Falling for Fraud

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This article is not a self-help, tips guide. I considered summing this article up with a long list of the tips I’ve learned over the years to help you avoid falling prey to internet fraud. My next thought was that I’m not smart enough to write a comprehensive list that could help you avoid falling prey to everything out there. Those lists are out there, and I encourage everyone to seek out, but I’m not brave, bold or brilliant enough to write one. This article will simply detail my personal and anecdotal experiences in this world. 
June 22, 2026: “Florida couple loses $141,000.00 to sweepstakes scam. The couple loses their car, their income, and their home after the dementia-suffering husband fell for a scam that informed him he won $4 million in a lottery.” Yahoo!news 

“The stupid things dumb people do,” was how one Yahoo commenter summed up their reaction to this story. I would’ve loved that reaction in my teens and twenties. “They’re just saying what we’re all thinking,” I would’ve said in-between giggles. Working as a fraud agent at a Fortune 500 company changed me. I talked to these dumb people, and if they’re dumb, then we’re all a lot dumber than we think.  

Who are the Victims? 

“I cannot believe this happened to me,” was the most common thing we heard from victims. They would tell us how intelligent and experienced they were. They would talk about how difficult their jobs were, and how their job required a high level of intellect that should never fall for something like this. “I thought I knew enough to know how to avoid something like this, but here we are,” they would add. 

Does that sound like you, and the shocked, embarrassed, and somewhat ashamed reactions you might have for falling for “The stupid things that dumb people do.” If you insist that only morons fall for online fraud, consider this: industry experts suggest that the total figures we have for cybercriminal activity skew low, because most victims are so embarrassed and humiliated that they fell for something so stupid that they won’t even report it to a fraud agent who is as low on the law enforcement totem pole as one could get. They’ll never meet me, so why would they care what I think? They do not want to go through the details, because they cannot bear having one person know how dumb they were. They just want to forget it ever happened. 

The fraud agents I worked with rarely characterized victims as dumb or stupid, because we heard from so many victims a day. We heard so many different stories that we knew the victims we were talking to weren’t in the minority. We usually spent the first couple minutes of every phone call talking these victims down. I may have considered these victims dumb or stupid when I first started working there, but I heard so much since that point that I knew I was as vulnerable as they were.  

I’ve heard from the prototypical little old ladies living on a pension, who had a little money set aside for a more comfortable living. I talked to hard-working joes who worked so hard their whole life and saved their 10% a year to allow their family to just barely escape lower middle class. I heard from so many representatives of age and economic demographic backgrounds that I progressed through a variety of emotional reactions that ended with sympathy and moved to empathy after I heard the wide array of schemes that our customers fell for. If I were to draw up a pie representing the typical victim, old people on a pension would represent the largest section, but that cut wouldn’t be as large as you might think. If you’re one of those who refuse to accept the idea that you’re a lot more vulnerable than you imagine, let me say that I was you, and you are me.   

Other than the ‘I’m too smart to fall for something so stupid,’ the greatest vulnerability I saw among victims was greed. The victims talked about how losing this money meant losing their comfortable lifestyle, which naturally led me to wonder why they would sacrifice that relatively comfortable lifestyle for the prospect of more. Is it an American characteristic, or is it human nature that we’re willing to sacrifice everything we have for the promise of something more? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I saw a wide array of victims put skepticism aside when they thought someone was offering them a pot of gold. The idea that something is too good to be true should require us to do our homework and use the tips that corporations provide to educate ourselves, or perform any checks of verification we can to reduce our risk. 

The theme of this article is that the moment after you think you’re general sense of judgement will prevent you from falling prey to one of their schemes will probably leave you vulnerable, but we saw some victims exhibit such poor judgement that it exacerbated what could’ve been a minor incident.

Who are the Cybercriminals? 

When we read, watch, and hear exposés about criminals, we often hear investigators characterize the criminal in their case as ingenious or brilliant. In my limited experience in this world, I haven’t found cybercriminals ingenious or brilliant. Most often than not, they just kept trying no matter how many times they fail. They exhibit some ingenuity and temerity, but I never saw one scheme that I considered brilliant or ingenious. 

If their first scheme does not convince us to part with the money we earned, these cybercriminals have a “no harm no foul” attitude. There was no crime committed, and thus no evidence of wrongdoing. Depending on the nature of their activity, we fraud agents might be able to restrict the cybercriminal’s access to their account, until they can prove their activity is not suspicious. If they can’t, they just open another account, and another, until they complete a fraudulent transaction. At that point, we can link up their accounts and activity to build a narrative. Long story short, most cybercriminals change, adapt, and tinker with their approach, until they can find a victim. The key word in that sentence is tinker. They might add a little something here or delete something there, “They are going to try hundreds of different approaches,” a fraud trainer once told us, “Because they only need one successful scheme to qualify as successful.” For example, professional fraud operations often use botnets, compromised servers, or spam-as-a-service tools that blast out millions of emails per day. Success rates are extremely low (often 0.01% to 0.1% click/open rates), so high volume is essential to generate enough victims to be profitable. How is that brilliant? My guess is that the investigators on the TV exposés on crime are the ones who cracked the case, so calling their case’s criminal brilliant enhances their profile for the audience. We should also note that I base my characterization of cybercriminals on the cases I investigated, and we could say I base my personal profile of them on anecdotal information. In my experience, cybercriminals aren’t ingenious or brilliant, they just tinker, adapt, and change their approach until they find the best way to prey on our vulnerabilities. 

Some fraudsters aren’t piece of junk who manage to distance themselves from empathy and sympathy, because their victim is some anonymous, faceless entity on the internet. (Their victims often have online nicknames, like rugrat, as opposed Peter J. Hansen, the electrician, who has spent his whole life saving this money.) This anonymous, faceless designation also permits us to characterize victims as “The stupid things that dumb people do,” because we don’t talk to them, see them, or feel their pain. Other cybercriminals are desperate people living in no hope situations, until they are employed by a shady outfit in their home country that exists to defraud victims out of our money. Their employees have quotas, and if they fail to hit their employers’ numbers, be they quantitative or qualitative, the employees are back out on their country’s desperate streets of abject poverty. These shady outfits provide their employees with tight scripts, but they also reward employees for creative improvising.   

When the shady enterprises from other countries are ‘caught’ engaging in fraudulent activity, some of the countries make it known they “don’t encourage such activity”, but the employees and the shady outfits receive little more than a slap on the wrist. The countries “don’t encourage it”, but the countries receive a Gross Domestic Product boost from the amount of money that the shady enterprises generate. We can only guess this doesn’t result in greater taxable revenue for the country, as most of the activity is “undetected” by the government, but we can guess that kickbacks are appreciated.  

One vulnerability we all share to ploys generated by cybercriminals is the ‘I’m too smart to fall for all that’ mentality. This is also where “The stupid things that dumb people do” line comes into play. In a manner somewhat similar to the original reason man created fictional monsters (vampires, werewolves, and mummies) to essentially zoomorphise the inhuman acts of sadistic murder that gives good men and women some comfortable distance between those who would commit mass murder. I think we label victims of cybercrimes as dumb and stupid to try to create a comfortable distance from the horrific possibility that this could happen to us too. The one thing I would tell people who scoff at the possibility that this could happen to them is I’ve talked to people like you every day. I talked to Midwesterners who appeared to know everything about the internet, fast-talking New Yorkers, Surfer dudes, and individuals with a pleasant, Southern Drawl. I talked to little old ladies on a pension, fathers with kids in private schools, and mothers who thought they could supplement the family’s finances. I talked to people who would remind you of your family members, your neighbors, and people who would remind you of you. The one thing they all had in common is they never thought they would fall for something like this. “I thought I’d be able to spot something like this,” they’d often say through tears. “I can’t believe I fell for it.” 

The Fraud Calls 

“This was my life savings,” was such a common phrase we fraud agents became numb to it. I loathe writing that all these years later, but it happens to us when we hear the same complaint, working on a phone line, forty hours a week. At lunch and on breaks, we would talk about the calls we took, and in the beginning, we talked about the heartbreak and devastation we heard, but it happened so often that our conversations switched to a callous competition about the dollar figures we witnessed. “I took a call today where a guy lost $50,000.” “That’s nothing, I took a call last week, where a guy lost $200,000.” It was our way of dealing with all of the sadness we heard.  

These victims called us to fix the devastation they put their proverbial foot in, and we could help them at times...if those victims called in in time. I wrote out a detailed description of process involved in our calls with customers, but I just … deleted it, because my guess is you don’t want to read the particulars the processes involved in these calls. Suffice it to say, I was able to help some of these victims, and I wasn’t able to help others.   

When these worst-case scenarios occurred, the resultant desperation I heard on the other end of the line still haunts me. “This was my life’s savings, my child’s tuition to a better life,” or “my family will be ruined by this,” were things I heard.  

When I first started taking these calls, I felt sympathy for the poor saps that fell for “Something like this.” It didn’t take long for that sympathy to evolve into empathy, as I began to see falling for these fraud schemes did not involve just the prototypical victims I imagined. I realized it could happen to anyone, including those I knew and loved, and a couple hundred more calls convinced me that this could happen to me. It wasn’t every call, of course, as some people did fall for some dumb tactics, but there were others, usually a couple calls a month, when I’d receive a call from someone who reminded me of myself, falling for something that I knew played on my vulnerabilities. I’d go back and investigate the history of the cybercriminal, through linked accounts, and I’d spot their tinkering.

Those of us who worked in this department also received death threats, but the more common reactions involved customers threatening to harm themselves. We heard these desperate people threaten to take their own life so often that our company developed a policy that instructed us to immediately contact their local law enforcement to do a wellness check on them, regardless if we felt we talked them down or not.   

To avoid hyperbole, most of the calls I received involved customers who got “A little ticked that they got got.” They got swindled, cheated, or tricked into paying for an item that was priced so low it was too good to be true. Most of the people I talked to paid twenty to thirty bucks for a product that should’ve cost four hundred to five hundred bucks. They were a little ticked, but “I should’ve known it was too good to be true”was their reaction. I took more than my share of calls from victims who were absolutely devastated by the amount of money these fraudsters tricked them into submitting, however, and “I really thought this was legit,” was their reaction. “I thought I was on the road to a better life.” What do we say to that? That guy probably couldn’t wipe the smile off his face one week, thinking about how he was going to spend all that money, and he then probably had trouble finding reasons to smile for a long time after this. 

When I was able to stop the money, the potential victims celebrated my name, and we laughed for a couple minutes, and they cried tears of joy at the end of our call. They said I was “Their hero.” One old woman wasn’t laughing or weeping with joy, she was bawling uncontrollably. She was so choked up that she couldn’t even speak. Her daughter took the phone from her mother and made me feel like the most special person in the world for one day of my life. 

There were times when the money was gone, out of our system, and the fraudster’s bank account. I instructed them that they would need to contact their local authorities. I instructed them what they should say, what evidence they should provide, and how I was going to provide notes on their account to detail the transaction(s) in a way that would bolster their case.   

These worst-case scenario calls would inevitably end with the victim saying, “Thank you, but let me ask you, based on your experience.” I would close my eyes with a lump in my throat, because I knew the back half of this question. “What do you think are my chances of getting my money back?” I’m in so deep at this point that I’m almost incapable of answering this question. I should add here that I was forbidden by my company from offering my opinion on a case that reached this point (This was for my protection and the company’s). Yet, even if my company hadn’t protected me in this way, I still would’ve felt so bad for them that I would’ve found it difficult to find the right words to say. How do you tell a little old woman that her worst fears of losing her home, her car, and the independent lifestyle she’s enjoyed her whole life are likely gone.

“Your chances of recovering the funds increase substantially if you follow the standard procedures I’ve outlined for you,” is what I would say. This would start a back and forth that would involve them trying to break me down for my opinion. “I’m just asking you, based on what you see and what you’ve seen, what are my chances?” I understood their need to badger me of course, because I was their only point of contact at this point, and they were imagining a bleak future. Before they allowed me off the phone, they wanted to know if they should have some small nugget of hope, or if they should concede to the idea that some criminal managed to not only steal their money, but the life they knew, and the future they planned. These people were devastated, and they wanted some low-level employee on the phone to give them some hope. I froze up on more than one occasion when they made the full breadth of their devastation apparent to me. I was incapable of telling them that the hopeless nature of their situation was probably just beginning.     

“You’re not paranoid if they’re really after you” 

We’re smart enough to spot a fraudster, and we know we wouldn’t fall for some piece of junk’s little games. We know how to spot a fraudster, because we’ve seen them on TV, and we’ve met them at our local, neighborhood liquor store. My experience as a fraud agent has informed me that I don’t know what to look for or how to spot a cybercriminal. There have no bullet point characteristics, and AND there are no bullet point characteristics of a victim either. Neither of them are more “worldly,” “street smart,” and it doesn’t matter if you “know how to play the game, because you’ve dealt with pieces of junk your whole life.” After dealing with both ends of the spectrum, receiving calls from victims and calling fraudsters, I didn’t grow more confident in my ability to spot a fraudster, I grew less confident. I became so uncomfortable with these situations that I became paranoid. I wouldn’t answer the phone from anyone I didn’t know, and on the rare occasion when I answered a call, I didn’t try to showcase my decade’s long experience. I hung up on them, or delete the email, or text as quickly as I could to avoid learning how vulnerable and susceptible I am. (I also avoid signing up for Customer Plus programs, petitions for local bills, and I now run from anyone associated with sales.) I provided a list of tips in the original draft of this article and I deleted it as I wrote earlier, but the best piece of advice I could provide anyone seeking how to avoid falling prey to internet fraud from cybercriminals is get paranoid. I write that knowing the cinematic phrase, “You’re not paranoid if they’re really after you,” and in my experience they’re all after you. Get paranoid!

Ozzy Osbourne is “That Thing at the Door”

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“There’s this thing at the door asking for you?” the brother of Terence Michael Joseph “Geezer” Butler informed him.  

“What do you mean this thing?” Geezer asked. 

“You’ll see.”  

Geezer didn’t get the joke, until he answered the door, and he saw a rain-drenched man with no hair on his head standing on his family’s doorstop. The man at the door had no shoes or socks on his feet, and he was wearing a gown that Geezer assumed was a pair of overalls that the man’s dad probably wore at a factory job. The man also had a chimney brush over his shoulder and a single sneaker on a dog leash. “I’m Ozzy,” the man at the door said. Geezer would later say he thought the man “was not the full shilling. (AKA off his rocker/crazy)” Yet he invited him in anyway — and changed rock history forever.

We can only guess how this interaction proceeded from there, as the two men tried to feel each other out, but Geezer was intrigued enough to invite this disheveled man into his rock band Rare Breed. The thing standing at Geezer’s door posted an ad in the Birmingham musical instruments store that read “Ozzy Zig Needs a Gig.” Geezer saw the ad, went to Ozzy’s house, Ozzy wasn’t home, so Geezer left his home address — and John “Ozzy Zig” Osbourne, or as we now know him Ozzy Osbourne, showed up later as that thing at Geezer’s door. 

Geezer, like Ozzy, grew up in a low income, working class neighborhood, and they both had six siblings, but the Butlers did not experience the level of poverty the Osbourne’s had. Those of us who grew up in similar neighborhoods know that we don’t meet many who are lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, and when we did, we looked down on them. Geezer and the Butlers were poor, but Ozzy grew up without basic comforts like indoor plumbing, and he and his siblings often used coats for bedding. As Geezer’s brother alluded, the Butlers probably viewed Ozzy as a lower life form. His appearance suggested he couldn’t even afford a decent pair of shoes.

When Geezer met Ozzy, he had a predicament. He had always been an avid reader with a strong background in English literature, especially Shakespeare, so writing song lyrics came easily for him, but he was not a strong, confident singer. He needed someone to deliver his lyrics to an audience. He had a message, in other words, but he needed a messenger to sell it properly. When Geezer imagined his messenger, he probably dreamt up a Robert Plant, Rod Stewart rock-god type who could seduce listeners into falling in love with Geezer’s lyrics. Every songwriter who can’t sing, dreams up bullet points for the singer of their songs, and we have to imagine that an overwhelming majority of them would’ve rejected “that thing at the door” on appearance alone. Is that what intrigued Geezer? As we now know, Geezer was not what we call a conventional songwriter, so Geezer may have thought that this thing at the door might have been able to attract an audience in the manner the lobster boy and the bearded lady attract an audience to the county fair? 

We could say that Geezer was desperate, but by historical accounts, Geezer only had one other lead singer prior to Ozzy, and that man quit Rare Breed once he heard how bad the band was. So, Geezer didn’t exactly exhaust all possibilities before meeting Ozzy. Geezer dresses this decision up by saying he was blown away by Ozzy’s audition, and that might be a fact, but it’s more likely that Geezer didn’t think he’d find a better lead singer in Birmingham, and his aspirations likely didn’t extend beyond the city at the time. He probably enjoyed seeing Ozzy’s unfiltered confidence and he suspected that Ozzy’s economic limitations and resultant gratitude meant that Ozzy would show up and help Geezer build and grow, regardless how bad the rest of the band was. Geezer’s suggestion that he could see Ozzy’s talent from the very beginning not only compliments his lifelong friend, but it suggests Geezer was gifted at spotting talent. My guess is Geezer wasn’t lying, but he’s rewritten this memory in his mind so thoroughly that this is how he genuinely remembers it. We can speculate further, but at the end of that debate we’d be forced to acknowledge that Geezer obviously made the right choice, as the two of them joined forces to create something no one else tried before, and it worked so well that we still talk about them almost sixty years later. 

Within two years of meeting the “thing at the door”, Geezer and Ozzy would be joined by two members of a band called Mythology, a guitarist missing the tips of his middle and ring fingers, named Tony Iommi, and an anatomically complete and relatively well groomed drummer named Bill Ward. They would change the band name from Rare Breed to Polka Tulk Blues Band, Polka Tulk, then Earth, and then Black Sabbath.  

In case you don’t know the four of them would go on to sell roughly 60–68 million albums (including pure sales, streams, etc.) when they were all in Black Sabbath together. The music of Black Sabbath would also influence the creation of heavy metal and later the heavy, sludge side of the Seattle sound sometimes called grunge. They’ve also been called one of the influential rock bands of all time, and it all started with Geezer meeting “this thing” at the door. 

***  

“So, this Geezer Butler fella got lucky,” you might say. “He had one of the most influential front men in rock music history just show up at his door one day. That’s luck.” It’s true, undeniably true, that luck and/or chance played a role, but how often do these chance meetings happen in music? We could also say that it wasn’t exactly a chance meeting, as Ozzy posted an ad, and they both met before as fanatical fans of The Beatles. Still, it can be frustrating to learn that luck, and right place/right time elements play a role in defining history, but it happens. The counterpoint to this argument is that we have to be good to get lucky.

They, Ozzy and Geezer, also got lucky that their band, Rare Breed, broke up when it did, because another band named Mythology broke up at around the same time. The guitarist and the drummer, of that band, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, were looking for another band to join at the same time that Ozzy and Geezer were looking for a guitarist and a drummer. (Geezer switched to bass when he saw how talented Iommi was.) Ozzy and Geezer just happened to find a guitarist who is now considered a master of riff‑craft, creating heavy, memorable guitar lines that became the blueprint for metal, and they happened to land a drummer who was a jazz‑trained, gig‑tested drummer whose unique style became a core part of the band’s identity. 

For all of the talent that existed in Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler was the conceptual architect and the primary lyricist behind the dark themes that defined early heavy metal. His style was heavy and melodic at the same time, and he was considered unusually expressive for the era. His bass lines often acted as a second lead instrument, weaving around Tony Iommi’s riffs rather than simply following them. Geezer also developed a rhythmic partnership with drummer Bill Ward to create the distinctive “swing” that underpinned many of the early Sabbath classics.

As Geezer described the relationship that would develop between he and Ozzy, Ozzy created vocal melodies during the band’s jam‑based writing sessions, and Geezer would write the lyrics to those vocal melodies. So, they used their talents, gifts, and creative energy to land in the right place and right time of music history.

If we examine Black Sabbath on an historical timeline, we could also say they got lucky to land in a right time/right place hole in time where no one had ever tried to make gloomy and depressing, as opposed to sad, music before. Yet, when we read the quotes from the members, they didn’t seek out a different form of music to carve out their own niche in the industry, and they didn’t plan on being pioneers, it was just who they were, where they came from, and what they knew. (All of the members of Black Sabbath grew up in the aftermath of WWII, and the war-torn, devastation influenced the gloomy themes of their sound and music that just happened to appeal to a large contingent in war-torn Brits of that era.)

In the era of upbeat harmonies, sunny melodies, and that breezy optimism sunshine pop, sunny melodies, and harmony‑rich 60s pop of The Beach Boys, The Monkees, and The Mamas & The Papas, Black Sabbath was viewed as a dumb idea by the fourteen labels who rejected them. The market is so stratified that we usually accept the idea that there’s no such thing as a dumb idea, but those labels all agreed that the gloomy, bleak, slow, and depressing music of Black Sabbath was a stretch too far. The basic sales pitch behind Geezer Butler’s presentation was that in a world that wants to listen to music that makes them smile, we have created a form of music that is so depressing we might lose a percentage of our fanbase to manic depression. In a world of feel-good music, we’ve created feel-bad. So, whaddya think?

For all of the luck, the right time/right place elements, and everything else that defined them, Black Sabbath shouldn’t have worked, not to the degree that some relatively anonymous writer would be writing about them nearly sixty years later. Even a qualified, quality writer would have trouble properly capturing how unlikely their success was. These were four kids who grew up in various levels of poverty who believed that the pinnacle of success would involve them playing in local pubs that would hopefully pay them enough for them to be able to afford a decent meal and a couple of beers to follow. These guys had no formal musical training, absolutely no industry connections, and they decided to play a style of music that didn’t exist yet — slow, heavy, ominous, and socially bleak and depressing.

We can imagine that their immediate success shocked the 14 major labels who rejected Black Sabbath before their first album was recorded and everyone else who worked with Sabbath before their first album was completed, but no one more surprised than the four members of the group. They knew they worked well together, and they gelled to create the type of sound they were seeking, but the idea that it clicked and/or appealed to listeners to the point that it reached #8 on 13 on the UK Albums Chart and #23 on the US Billboard Top LPs shortly after its US release stunned the four fellas. They didn’t really have to “pay their dues” in a relative sense. They compiled a selection of five songs for their first album Black Sabbath, recorded them in one 12-hour session, and they released it. They were just happy that a label signed them, and they were actually able to record an album. That, to that point, was beyond their expectations. The idea that it would chart with no radio play, combined with the critics dismissing it as a crude, simplistic, or derivative effort was beyond their comprehension. Another source notes that Black Sabbath remained on the charts for over a year and sold one million copies in its first run (US + UK combined).

All four members have said, in various ways, that they couldn’t believe it when some people initially started treating them like a real band, then when their album charted it scared them a little, because they didn’t know what to do with that. When they were asked to tour the United States of America, it wasn’t mild surprise, as none of them knew enough to know logical progressions of this sort. They were genuinely stunned. Ozzy described his genuine reaction to this insanity by saying he was constantly waiting for someone to tap him on the shoulder and say “There’s been a mistake, a huge mistake.” Tony Iommi said, “We never thought it would go anywhere. Our goal was to avoid factory work, and we thought we could do so with a few gigs here and there.” Ozzy said that their goal was to eventually get in pubs, so that the pubs would pay them enough to drink their beer. “We never thought we’d get out of Birmingham,” Ozzy added. Bill Ward said, “We didn’t know what we were doing — and suddenly it worked.” Geezer said, “We were just four poor kids. We didn’t think it would last.” All four members were from lower class to absolute poverty, as Geezer said, and that probably led to the level of desperation necessary to make whatever they did work.

Anyone who has ever read anything about the recording industry of this era, knows how this chapter of the Black Sabbath saga ends. As poor and uneducated as the four fellas who comprised this band were, in general, they probably knew less about the recording industry, recording industry contracts, and the manner in which their management team should be handling their financial matters. They wanted to focus on creating the music and let management take care of the financial matters, and their creations 4.9 million copies of the first album, and the second album, Paranoid, sold between 10-12 million copies, by global sales estimates, they were almost as broke as they were before they recorded their first album. They signed a horrible contract, because they were so elated that someone wanted them to sign them that they probably thought if they haggled over the details of the contract, the management team might not sign them.

“We were one of the biggest bands in the world,” Geezer said, “and we were penniless.” One example cited stated that Black Sabbath were paid $250,000 to play at a 1974 California Jam festival, and each member ended up receiving $1,000. As stated, management teams and recording labels ripped off most of the artists of the era, including the Rolling Stones and The Beatles, but music historians suggest that Black Sabbath’s management disputes were some of the ugliest and most damaging in rock history. When the fog cleared, the members discovered that not only were they almost as broke as they were when they started, but their cars, homes, and other personal possessions weren’t theirs. In the most crushing blow, they then discovered that their music, that which they worked their tails off to create, hone, and perfect wasn’t even theirs. After years of litigation and lawsuits, it is suspected that the four members may have recovered 10-20% of the money their manager stole.

Black Sabbath worked for a whole host of reasons, of course, but they were dumb enough and desperate enough to make it work on a certain level. They had a Beatles-obsessed lead singer, who learned the art of melody from his beloved mop tops, a Shakespeare-obsessed lyricist, a guitarist who was missing the most important finger tips required to play guitar, and a jazz drummer who helped develop a new form of musical expression. Their eventual success suggest that some ideas are such a load of crap that if it’s gathered together, it could be used as fertilizer. The four members didn’t know enough about the system to know how to succeed in it, and they got lucky. The fact that they got so lucky that they’re unicorns, should not be discounted here. Most of us should spend most of our young life trying to figure out the system works to see how we can succeed in it, but some of us weren’t built like that, and some of the ideas we have might appear like “that thing at the door” to others, but the question that we should ask ourselves, is a question I’m sure Geezer Butler asked himself on the day he met Ozzy Osbourne, ‘what would happen if I invited this man in?’ What would happen if we invited that weird, strange, and just plain different idea in and explored the possibilities? If we drop an adamant no to all of that, we’ll never know. The story of Black Sabbath teaches us that some of the times it’s better to say no, unless...

“Never had a Drink. NEVER Will!”

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“I don’t drink,” non-drinkers say proudly. “Never have. NEVER will!” They add that they’ve never experimented with drugs, taken a drag off a cigarette, and they don’t even drink coffee or soda now. Then, just when you think they’re done, they add, “AND I won’t put anything with high fructose corn syrup in my body either!” This is all important to them, but they’ll punctuate their rant with, “I’ve never taken a drink of alcohol.”

My guess is that their message starts out as a noble, humble “If I can do this anyone can” gesture that they hope inspires us to think it’s not necessary to drink to have a good time. They also want to send the message that alcohol does not fill the voids, salve the wounds, or anything else we might attach to alcohol, and they want us to view them as a shining beacon of that message.

The idea that anyone can graduate from college without ever taking a drink astounds some of us, and we’re generous with our praise. We do this because sobriety is a laudable goal, but we know we couldn’t have done it. The message of the sober-for-life crowd is that they were strong enough to avoid the temptation, and that is large part of the equation, but for those of us who caved to peer pressure, it was also about that Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) element.

Sobriety is, was, and always will be a laudable goal, don’t get me wrong, but some of the sober-for-life crowd repeat their message so often that rest of us view the messenger as obnoxious, smug, and so repetitive that the message gets lost in the perceived pursuits of the messenger. My guess is that those who chose sobriety for life have put up with so much over the years/decades that now that many are turning their backs on alcohol, this is their time to shine. I also think they enjoy the praise and the shock so much that they repeat their message as often as they can.

I’m not one of those who say, “C’mon, you know you have. How about at church? did you drink the wine?” I’m not one of those who hunts for hypocrisy or calls people out in any way I can. I accept their testimonial at face value, applaud it, and move on. They can’t. They cannot help but go so over the top that we get sick of hearing about it. They cannot talk about a vacation they took with a group of people, without saying, “Of course, I don’t drink. Never have. NEVER will! But they didn’t know that.” I might admire them, if they could say that without appearing smug, obnoxious, and superior, and I might be in awe of them if they could talk about their lifelong sobriety responsibly.  

The awe I express is a result of me picturing them in my high school, my college years, and my early years in the workforce. “How did you escape high school and college without drinking one alcoholic drink? How did you make friends?” I realize that writing that reveals something about the people I hung around and me, but I consider defeating peer pressure by maintaining sobriety during those years so implausible as to be impossible. We even frowned on responsible drinking when I was a teen. “Responsible drinking? Isn’t that for people in their sixties?” We thought that was such a great line, so hilarious and all that, because we thought it was true. Some were strong, they accepted the requisite beer, and they milked it for hours. It was admirable, but they still broke down. No one I know was forceful enough to defeat the dark side.

I might be wrong, but I think it’s easier to avoid drinking now than it was in my youth. Sobriety is just more acceptable now, and I think the current generation has our generation to thank for that, because they didn’t have to grow up in bars, they weren’t subjected to their dad’s drunken behavior, and they didn’t grow up thinking you had to have a drink in your hand to have a good time. I’m sure young people still have some peer pressure to drink, smoke, and consume high fructose corn syrup, but when I hear someone my age managed to maintain a life of sobriety, I’m doubly impressed, because I know what I went through. If we didn’t have a drink in hand in those years, not only would the party’s host view it as an insult, but we’d get that look from our peers. “C’mon, I thought you were all about fun?”

***

“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” –Frank Sinatra.  

“I don’t drink,” a friend of mine said. “Never have. NEVER will!”   

“That’s great,” we say, “but I was just asking you if you’ve ever been to a Piggly Wiggly. It’s a supermarket.” 

“I don’t drink.” 

“It has nothing to do with drinking,” we say. “I just thought it was an unusual name for a supermarket, and I wondered if you’ve ever been to one.” 

We could be talking about cracks in the sidewalk, and this guy would find a way to slip a note into the conversation about his lifelong sobriety. Again, “Bravo!” and all that, but after so many repeated reminders, it does start to lose its luster. If you’ve ever met this guy, you know you’ll walk away without knowing his last name, his politics, his religion, or his ethnic heritage, but you’ll know he doesn’t drink, and he NEVER will! They say it so often that on those occasions when they don’t bring it up, it feels odd and creates a void that you’re waiting for them to fill. 

“It’s all about my mama,” he said. “I know how ashamed she would be if I showed up to her home loaded or recovering from a hangover.” He says that on Monday, but on Tuesday, it’s all about brain cells. “I’ll bet I could hold my own against anyone, one-on-one in a debate, because you’ve all killed so many brain cells over the years that I just have a natural advantage over you.”  

If he was a former alcoholic (I know, no one is a former alcoholic), we could understand him bragging about his sobriety all the time. Sobriety is an achievement for someone who was so addicted that alcohol wrecked their life for a chunk of time. We also know that most alcoholics don’t drink to excess because they like the taste. It satisfies some inner need, it fills a void, it defeats an internal demon, and it keeps the forces narrowing in on them at bay. They’re losing those fights so badly that the only, temporary relief they find comes from the contents of a bottle. If, however, you claim that you’ve “Never drank, and they NEVER will!” I guess we could claim that you won by not succumbing to the idea that alcohol is an answer, but you didn’t defeat the temptation of alcohol, because you never really played.

So, if you are a former alcoholic, I’ll sing your praises, applaud, or do whatever I can to encourage your fight. If I’m your party host, and you claim that you’ve never had it, NEVER will, I’ll just say, “Okay, what would you prefer to drink then?” Who cares, in other words. You’re not fighting demons or anything else. You’ve made a laudable lifelong decision and bravo for doing it. At some point, however, it just becomes a preference. If you’re still in your teens-to-twenties and in what I consider the heat of the battle, I might applaud you, because I know the peer pressure to maintain sobriety is intense. If you’ve never had a drink your entire life, and you’re 40+ years in, it’s just kind of who you are at this point, why do you still feel the need to talk about it so often?  

If you’ve never had chocolate and never will, it’s a preference, but I’ve never met someone who brags about never eating chocolate. If you’ve never had pie your whole life, you don’t bring it up at parties, in casual conversations, or in other social situations. You just don’t like pie. If you’ve never worn a T-shirt in public, “Never have. NEVER will!” most people don’t trumpet that. It just is, but people who have never had a drink of alcohol and brag about it so often make me think they are either on the verge of taking a sip, or they use it to feel superior to the rest of us who do drink.

“I don’t drink,” non-drinkers say proudly. “Never have. NEVER will!” Some say this in a manner that suggests they are on offense, and that my reflexive reaction should be a defensive one. It creates an odd magnetic repulsive force (similar to the force of the other side of the magnet) between us that I end by saying, “Well good for you,” I say, which defuses the tension and creates a different, weird tension of deflated expectations. I think they expect me to mount some sort of defense of alcohol, but I don’t know anyone who would defend alcohol, unless they said, “I don’t see anything wrong with drinking responsibly.”

I’m sure former, (lapsed, or however they identify themselves) alcoholics would say I used to be an alcoholic, if they read my story. I would say, at worst, I used to be a binge-alcoholic. I could go an entire week, even a month, without drinking, but when those high school, college, or co-worker, Friday night parties arrived, I got slaughtered. I don’t view that as a brag, or anything admirable, but I never craved alcohol. I didn’t like the taste of beer, wine, or anything harder. After years of sobriety, I tried craft beer and discovered that beer could actually tasted good, but at most I drank maybe two of them a night. In my younger years, alcohol was a social lubricant, and it was a way to drop my social inhibitions. Some said I was more fun and funnier when I had a few beers in me, and I thought I was too, but I admittedly did not know the limits social advocates talk about when they define responsible drinking. I’m quite sure a psychiatrist or psychologist could find a whole host of ghosts and demons that were chasing after me back then, but I didn’t see it. I thought I was drinking to excess for excessive fun. Now that it’s all over, and I don’t drink to get a buzz, drunk, or slaughtered anymore, I still don’t see the any harm in what I did back then. I now down the occasional craft beer, and while the newsfeed articles talk about “What drinking just one glass of alcohol does to your body,” I don’t see the need to stop.