One day while I was working on a sales presentation, a company called me at the office to try to sell me an updated website based on their current association profile.

I asked them how they had gotten my name and number, and they told me that they had spoken personally with the President of the association I belonged to, and he had given them permission to call all the members to see if they wanted to upgrade.

Sounds convincing, right? There was just one problem: I happened to have the honor of serving as president of the association that year, and I had never even heard of this company, let alone given them permission to contact our membership.

My guess is, they had simply gotten our member profiles off of the association website, and were using this lie to try to sell us their advertising. A shame that, while they were online, they hadn’t taken the time to note down the president’s name – or gender!