Every so often, he has a twinkle in his eye. Just like the ice cream trickery to the front row at the US open. I have hold back my usual habit of i can’t ask…i can’t ask such a question habit. In some sense, I wouldn’t lose anything by asking (except my dignity whenever I think of the situation). But if you don’t try?!

Some tips and tricks:

Blame someone else for doing something you didn’t intend to do.
Getting a free caltrain ride (although I got yelled at) for an unredeemed ride. I said that a friend told me that I could do it. Basically, it wasn’t me. It was someone else!

Don’t show any insecurity. Believe that it was valid!
Using a $8.50 movie pass for a single ticket of the nearly sold out IMAX showing of The Dark Knight. Unfortunately, I had read pages and pages of how it was a YMMV deal. I spent time drafting an counterargument to “Sorry we don’t accept that” when the guy just nonchalantly took my pass and gave me a ticket to the IMAX showing.

Say you belong there. Make up plausible stories. Speak in a foreign language. Dress the part. Lock the door.
And of course, the infamous night how we got box seats at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House.

We lost our cellphones after the opera and came up with a plausible story so that we could not only check the ground floor, the box seats and the top tier…in the end, it turned out to be ok.