I was feeling a deep ugly sensation, and it took me a while to name it. It turned out to be shame.
It triggered memories from a Catholic boyhood, waiting on line to confess my sins.
Shame was not an emotion I remember feeling as an adult. Embarrassment, guilt, regret: yes, yes, yes. But not shame.
The source was an email scam, a grift that took me down a rabbit hole that almost had me revealing banking information to a stranger. It took a single online search by my daughter to reveal that this was a common trap that had ensnared countless innocents.
It worked like this.
My email appeared to be a professional invoice from the Geek Squad and Best Buy, a store from which we had purchased many electronic products, from computers to printers to big screen TVs. The invoice said that we had been charged $413 for our subscription for security software. It had been a couple of years since we hired a reliable techie to come in and clean out and secure our home computers. So maybe this charge was somehow related to that.
It occurred to me that this invoice was for a recurring charge, though it seemed exorbitant (which should have been my first alert). It offered me a chance to cancel the subscription, with a phone number to take action. A very friendly man said that he could walk me through the process of cancelling the subscription. Then, he said, he would turn me over to another department where someone would help me receive my $413 refund. That refund would be delivered…
