🧩 PART 1: The Phisher, the Pétrus, and the Pitch

This actually happened: a wrong number. A luxury wine order. A text exchange that spiraled into something… else...

   

    It started like any other phishing text: badly targeted, oddly polite, and suspiciously high-end. At 9:17 AM, during normal working hours, I received a message from someone named “Eliza.” She claimed she had ordered five bottles of 2014 Pétrus but had received 2004 instead.

Clearly, I’m not James.

But I let it sit...

Then, at the end of the following day, sometime around 8 PM, my wife was on a business trip (something to do with art), and I was home alone, slightly bored, having my one doctor-approved glass of red, I decided it was finally time to respond to that would-be wine phisher.

And I didn’t just reply Wrong numba...

I looped in ChatGPT to hone my prompting skills.

What followed was a surreal blend of luxury wine logistics, quantum investing, poetic metaphors, and escalating absurdity, all documented here, screen by screen. I call this: Front Stage. Everything Eliza saw.

Note: No names were changed, because none of them were real to begin with.