The Long Con Sometimes it can be fun to shitlord in such a way that you can string fatties along for quite a while until you thrust the knife in. When my daughter was a girl scout, I helped out with a lot of troop activities. One year the leader asked me to take charge of the cookie sales event. One of the other mothers -- a disgusting fatty -- volunteered to "help" and there was no socially acceptable way to decline her decidedly unwanted "help". To cope with the stress of having to deal with this unpleasant woman, I decided to shitlord her in a way so subtle that by the time the payoff came, she would (hopefully) be devastated. When the cookie order sheets arrived, I oohed and ahhed and pretended to salivate over all the delicious sugary goodness presented in those food porn quality photos. I never once uttered any type of sanity that might suggest moderation was a good idea.  I egged her on to join me in fantasizing of ways to consume these delicious morsels in the most decadent ways. (You know they never just gorge on their sweets in their native form if there is any way they can make them even worse by deep-frying them or crumbling them into a milkshake for example.) Now you would think this would trigger (teehee) a negative reaction in her, something along the lines of "You look like you've never touched a cookie in your life." (because it's always all-or-nothing to a fatty). But she was so mesmerized by our sweet sweet verbal fantasies that her judgement was even more clouded than usual I guess. She really thought we were in this thing together. Every few days I would mock-complain that I wish the order deadline would hurry up and get here because I kept increasing my order and that was going to cost me! (only in dollars of course -- I never hinted that maybe there could be such a thing as ordering too many cookies simply because who the fuck needs that many calories ever?) It sounds so obvious that you would think the fatty would catch on (no one my size would even remotely view cookies this way), but I think she was so blinded by her own enthusiasm for my ideas that she ignored the cognitive dissonance. The day the orders were due, I asked her to double-check all the girls' numbers before I sent them because I wanted to make sure she saw that I was ordering like a dozen of each variety for myself. Then before I actually submitted the order, I changed mine back down to a human-sized order and sent it all in. During the waiting period for the cookies to arrive, I would sometimes bring up how much I was anticipating them and looking forward to all the various concoctions and just having something awesome to snack on until they ran out. I said that I had cleared out half my freezer to make room to store mine because they taste better that way. I said that to prevent other family members from stealing them, I was going to take them all out of their boxes before freezing them and wrap them in plain foil, put them in ziploc baggies, and label them 'salmon' because of course who would want to steal something like that teehee? Every time I came up with a new shitlording idea I would hesitate because it would sound particularly over the top to me and I didn't want her to catch on. But she never did. She would just chortle and join in with her own decadent ideas that were obviously as serious as mine were fake. When delivery day came, we gathered in my garage and started sorting the cookies into piles. Mine ended up being a pile of 6 boxes, next to her pile of 28 boxes. She became concerned and said, "Did they short us? Where are the rest?". I feigned ignorance and said, "I think that's it, everything checks out on my list...? Are you missing some?". She laughed and said, "Oh no, I pulled mine first teehee. But where are the rest of yours?". I said, "Right here." She said, "Oh." Her face fell. I said, "Oh. Uh I mean, it was fun to fantasize but I can't actually go through with stuff like that. Wish I could! I love girl scout cookies but let's not get carried away!". She laughed weakly and said "I mean, yeah, most of mine are for extras in case the girls need them." I said, "Yeah, you're braver than I am! I only ordered 6 because why tempt myself unnecessarily. Anyway, the girls knew to order extras if they wanted, so you might end up being able to donate your extras to a food pantry -- win-win!". She did not look enthusiastic about that idea at all, and I have no doubt that they all ended up in her belly within days. But the following year I did not have to deal with her "help".