If it walks like a Duck...

This isn't a Swedish post, or even related to Sweden. But it's about a recent news report that came out of New Zealand and really pissed me off. I don't know which is worse, being taken for a fool, or having someone think I'm stupid enough to be fooled so easily. For those of you not familiar with the case, here the high/low lights as our "victim" has disclosed to the media to date:

54 year old former probation officer and former deputy head of an obscure government department housed in a broom cupboard somewhere in the backstreets of Wellington, Sharon Armstrong, met a guy on-line and then decided to fly from NZ to London to meet him. At the last minute he asked her if she wouldn't mind diverting to Argentina to pick up some papers for him that he needed in order to get a job. She flew to Argentina and stayed there for a week. While waiting to board her flight to London, her newly purchased Argentinian suitcase was searched and found to have 5kg of cocaine stashed in the base. She was also found to have a number of driving licences from different countries. She was duely locked up and is awaiting trial. After a few days of joking to the NZ media about how she had been scammed, she finally grasped the seriousness of the situation and has claimed that she knew nothing about the drugs. She's also refusing to name the person she was going to meet, fearing "reprisals" if she does. And is claiming corruption by the police for releasing the details about her extra driving licences.

So there you have it.

Where does one start ? This story has more holes than an Estonian brothel.

I'd like to believe Sharon, really I would. A 54 year old woman finally having a shot at true love and happiness. Good for her. Sadly, it's bollocks. Not the meeting someone on the internet part. I know a lot of people who have found the love of their life on-line. No worries about that. In fact, I'm in favour of it. A much better way to find out about someone without the stress of sexual obligations hanging over your head from the start. And infinitely better than waking up in a drunken stupor trying to figure out how you're going to avoid spending the next 10 years with, whateverhernameis. I suspect that there are an equal number of on-line and off-line relationship disasters out there.

Sharon was possibly in love with this guy. But she knew damned well what she was doing in Argentina. Does Argentina not have a postal service that sends documents to England ? Apparently not.

Once you get there, does it take a week to get these papers ? It would seem so. There's a British Airways flight departing from Buenos Aires to London at 1pm every frickin day of the week. I checked and I can book a vacant seat on tomorrow's flight.

Since when did a CV weigh 5kg ? My CV detailing 25 years of my working life is three A4 pieces of paper. Total weight: 15 grams. This bloke's CV must have been made up of 1,000 A4 papers. "War and Peace" has 700 sheets of paper.

A question to throw out there: If you were going to meet someone for the first time, and picked up some papers to take to him, that detailed his working career, wouldn't you want to read them ? Just out of curiosity, to learn a bit more about the love of your life. Yeah, we would all say a big fat "no", that we would respect privacy and all that. Crap. You, me, and anyone else, would read them. If she thought it was papers, she would have either opened them up to read and then discovered it was a funny white powder, or at least wondered why these "work documents" weighed more than a standard bag of potatoes. Give me a break.

She's refusing to name the man she was going to meet, for fear of reprisals. Hang on a minute, right up until the moment the Argentine police tapped her on the shoulder at the departure gate, this guy was the love of her life and she trusted him with her soul. Now, despite having zero contact with him since, he is suddenly the long lost twin brother of Pablo Escobar. Sharon, you're about to do 15 years in an Argentine prison. You'll be 70 years old before they chuck you out. Do you really have that much to lose ?

Sticking with the name issue, what about her family ? She was leaving her homeland for the rest of her life. Doesn't at least one member of her family, a friend, a work colleague, know the name of this person ? Contact details in the case of an emergency (like being locked up in Argentina). You would think that someone might have asked what his name was, or been shown a photo of him. She should have been so excited about all this. There's not a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to tell people the name of your soulmate. One springs immediately to mind.

Hang about, what about these "papers" that she picked up. The police will have those now and they'll have his name plastered all over them, right ? Documents about a person tend to include the name of that person on them. So she won't need to name him. Problem solved, and dear Shaz no longer has to fear for her safety. Unless the name on the papers doesn't match the name she knows him by. Which begs the question as to why she then decided to carry on with the trip. More likely that those papers are as fictional as the rest of her sorry tale.

If this guy is a professional crim, then what are the odds that the very first person he has contacted, out of a squillion internet users, happened to be our Sharon. Rubbish. He would have tried and failed to convince many (smarter) women, before stumbling across lonely Sharon. Giving up his name could only strengthen her case if other women come forward with similar tales.

Why is it that her first public comment was to laugh about being scammed and being a "silly old woman" ? (That's the understatement of the year) This was the love of Sharon's life, the man she was leaving her life and moving 10,000 km to the other side of the world to be with. Why was she not in the least bit upset or heartbroken about the emotion betrayal. I can't speak for Sharon, but I might have mentioned being a bit sad over being abused by someone I had given my heart to. Maybe I'm made of different stuff.

I'll tell you why that is. There is no internet guy, Sharon. You can't name him because he doesn't exist. If it helps you any, I could start up a Hotmail email account and start sending myself letters of love to prove that I have a deep and meaningful relationship. And I could tell all my friends about a wonderful person I had met. Doesn't make it true though.

Door number two says that there is a guy. And that you and him were in this together from the start. 5kg of cocaine, or the fee for carrying it, would set you up pretty well at age 54. You can't name him, because he'd only incriminate you. Better to stay silent and hope that aliens or Global Warming will come to your rescue.

The driving licences. I'm presuming they were all in her name. Two were NZ licences. That's fair enough, but I struggle to think of a reason as to why a person would need two currently valid driving licences from the same country. A bit dodgy. Another was from the Cook Islands, which I do understand that you are required to purchase if you want to drive as a tourist. It's more of a tourist trinket that anything else. The third is an Australian licence. That one is a bit strange as you can drive perfectly legally in Australian with a valid NZ licence. You do wonder why one would decide to take all 3 to the UK, but they are probably a storm in a teacup. Where I'm confused is how the Argentine police became corrupt by releasing that information to the media. The police right around the world release information about suspects and people in custody all the time. That's how the media find out about these things in the first place. Grasping at straws there, Sharon, and a clear sign of desperation.

5 kg of drugs hidden in the base of her suitcase. On what planet would it be considered reasonable to pack up her suitcase with a lifetime change of underwear, fly to another country, completely unpack her suitcase, chuck her perfectly suitable airline approved suitcase away, buy a new suitcase, re-pack her clothes into the brand new (drug laden) suitcase which she had never seen in her life before, and try to fly on to a third country. And now she expects sympathy. Not from me. An empty suitcase that weighed near enough to 10kg ? Turn it up.

Finally, we have the cries and wails from Sharon and her cronies that she had no idea there were drugs in her suitcase. Well, naturally that must be the truth then. Because, as we all know, drug traffickers always tell the truth. If she knew she was carrying drugs, she would have said so. Like all the others before her have. So, if she said that she didn't know, then she's clearly not a drug trafficker. I'm personally offended by this attempt to avoid justice. There's such a thing has supporting your friends, but how about aiming for a shred of credibility, people.

I'm sure we'll hear more about this over the coming weeks/months. But, as it stands today, Sharon Armstrong is a 54 year old drug trafficker and deserves everything thast she gets. She's about as innocent as the stupid Australian girl who decided to take a dodgy old polystyrene "boggie board" all the way from Australia to Bali on holiday (because apparently such things don't exist in Bali) and then feigned shock when the bag weighed more than twice what it should have due to the copious amounts of pot stuffed inside it. Hey, how about trying to blame the airport baggage handlers, Sharon ? You two deserve each other.

Of course, in the interests of liability, I should point out the the views expressed above are not necessarily those of anyone. Except maybe those of anyone with half a brain.