I recently visited one of the most popular classic car events of South Florida, the “Towershoppes of Davie Friday Night Cruise”, which I visit frequently. It is a great place to meet other classic car and old truck lovers and chat with them about most anything besides classic cars and old trucks. It is also a great place to take pictures and record videos because there’s a great variety of antique and classic vehicles there. And I take a lot of pictures too.
Well, this time I was in for a little surprise and a strange experience. There was a gentleman there with a nice truck of the 1950’s whom I approached and asked for permission to take pictures of his truck. He granted me permission and I snapped a few shots of the truck. And then I went back to the man to ask him a few questions about his vehicle, how long he had it, how did he get it, info about restoration and things like that. But it was hard to get anything out of him. The guy was interested in selling some health product, a type of fruit imported from South America and that was the only thing he wanted to talk to me about. It’s one of those Multi Level Marketing schemes they want to get more people to join in order to allow them to make their money. I have nothing against MLM but this guy didn’t give me any room at all to talk. If he didn’t have a great looking old truck I wouldn’t bother trying to talk to him.
After a while I gave up. After all, I had already taken a good number of pictures of his truck and had even recorded about a minute of video there. I gave the man my card and left.
Three days later the guy calls me on the phone and starts talking about the product he was selling, pushing me to join his “company”. I said no and explained that MLM is not something I want to get involved in. It’s not for me, I know I can’t get a fair number of people under me to sell whatever product they’re selling and thanks, but no, thanks. Then he asked me what I was going to do with the pictures I had taken of his truck. Well, when I asked for his permission to take the pictures I explained that I have this blog and that I might use the pictures in my blog. At first he was excited about it but when he called me on the phone he simply said that I could not show those pictures to anybody and specially not on the Internet… Wow! What a change of attitude!
Why would somebody do that? Is there a problem showing pictures on the Internet? I know that you need authorization for that from the owner of the vehicle, even if you take the pictures yourself but why would he change his mind like that? Yeah, it was probably because I didn’t buy the miracle product he was selling… He wanted to punish me for not joining his MLM group.
Whatever his reason, I want to send him a message through this blog. I have the pictures and the video of his truck and I am not going to publish them. Not only because he asked me not to, but because I don’t need to do that. I have thousands of other pictures of trucks as good or better than his and I still have my cameras to take thousands more. I am also not going to publish them because I think he is not a sincere person. He is using his truck to lure people and to push for the sale of his product. Is this legal? Probably. But I don’t like that. I go to classic car shows to see classic vehicles and to talk about them. I don’t go to these shows to shop and specially not to be pushed into an MLM program…
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