How I came to name a private body part

I don’t name a lot of things. My car has no name. My house has no name. None of my guitars has a name. Some people would think I was completely impoverished. No, make that many people.

The Hat Circa 1985

I first discovered the need to name when I took a liking to a certain hat many years ago. I wore that hat in what could be called true cowboy style — I never took it off. Well, I didn’t wear it to bed or in the shower, but everywhere else you found me you found it. People began asking me if my hat had a name. When I told them that the hat was nameless, they would begin what I called the hat dance.

First, they believed that the hat had a name and that I wasn’t sharing it. Then, they became angry because if they spent 90% of their waking hours with a hat, it would have a proper name and why couldn’t I be like other people and not be so weird. They would say that I had no heart and didn’t love my hat enough to give it a name. Just before they would walk away, there would be the acceptance that I had indeed resisted the urge to anthropomorphize my hat.

The question became a conversational gambit for the small talk impaired. Right after the “Hi, how are you” would come the inevitable “what’s your hat’s name?” I should have bought the hat business cards and taken to introducing it around as the hat-with-no-name. Instead, I came up with a cheaper solution — a smart-alecky reply.

“If I gave the hat a name, then it would have top billing!” I would protest. That witty reply fell flat about everywhere I dropped it, but I am nothing if not dogged in my loyalty to it.

The Death Trap 1974

My car didn’t have a name either, for a while. My friends drove Bessie’s and Edith’s and Sam’s while I made do with a generic no-name Volkswagen that had the nasty habit of opening its passenger door when I made a left-hand turn. It was during one of these exciting moments that my friend, Bill Postel, christened my car. After we stopped to wipe off the seat, he finished the job by naming my car “The Death Trap.”

Here was something my friends could appreciate — a man who had a name for his car. I knew I had arrived when one of the car-less girls at the college radio station came up and asked if she could borrow “The Death Trap” to run up to the convenience store. My car had a name. It must be friendly. Tell that to the guy who bought it from me only to have the engine toss a rod on the way home. Silly me, I neglected to tell him that the car had a name.

The belief that when you name something you have control over it comes to us from ancient times. In the Bible, God was always renaming people to show his ownership of them. Parents do the same thing to children. Listen to parents at the end of their persuasions as they scream a child’s full name to let them know that they really are serious this time.

I have no better example of this than the feckless male practice of naming their reproductive organs. Most men (and all women agree with them) have no control over it. None at all. So, they name it in the hope that the appearance of control is almost as good as the real thing. As you may have guessed by now, mine was nameless for many years.

I was unaware that I had neglected this vital rite of passage until one night when I was the designated

The Radio Sales Team

driver for a van-load of drunken radio people. My all-female crew was chattering away as we rolled back into town on US 41. One of them told of a recent floating party on the Suwannee River (and they were way down upon it, too) where the weekend had come to the obligatory skinny dipping event.

“All of them had names for their hoonies!” she screamed and all the others screamed, too.

Very quickly, eyes rested on the sober sales manager who was driving the van — the only male in the vehicle. Since they were drunk and the radio station was too small to have a sexual harassment policy, they asked. They didn’t believe. Surely a woman down the line had done for me what I had not done for myself. Things were getting uncomfortable, so I took control — I named it.

Right there in front of them, I named it after the station’s receptionist who was riding shotgun in the van. She admitted it to be a singular honor. She didn’t admit to much else after that. One of the other girls began teasing her over it, so I threatened to have a name change if the subject wasn’t dropped. Virility intact, I hastened back to town clutching the forlorn hope that they would be too drunk to remember my act of wild abandon.

It must have been the secondary alcohol fumes. How else do you explain that your member is named for a stranger you never knew in the biblical sense?

No. I’m not telling you. She got married. He has lawyers. I avoid tattoo parlors.

This piece originally appeared on my personal web space in about 1995 and has been offline for a year or more. It made the “Best of the Web Today” that week and can still be found on the way-back machine. I need to scrounge up a picture of the hat when it was younger — 1975 was when it was born. The picture of the radio crew shows some of the ladies that were on board the van that fateful night.

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By: Marvel Goose

“Thank God you are here!  You have got to help me win this contest!” shouted Monique, the store manager.

It was right after Thanksgiving and I was calling on my radio advertising clients collecting their new advertising copy for the week.  There was no one else in the store but myself and Monique. That’s not her real name.  In fact, my pseudomym is the only real name in this entire story.

“What contest?” I said in trepidation. Working for a radio station, I was often creating and executing contests which required one to be scrupulously honest or go to the clink for fraud. I was not about to rig any contests.

“They’re having a Home for the Holidays contest over at WBBQ.  I have got to win this contest.  My mother’s heart disease is getting worse and this could be the final Christmas before she dies.  I will never forgive myself if I don’t get home this year for Christmas, but Maine is so far away.  I can’t afford to fly. Have you seen what Delta is charging for tickets?  It would take Fifteen Hundred Dollars for Rob and me to fly home.  I don’t have fifteen hundred dollars for tickets!  That’s why I have to win this contest!”

I did not tell Monique that I-95 will get anyone to Maine that wants to go there in about 22 hours — if you wear a diaper and have enough sandwiches and coffee on the front seat. Monique is not the kind of person who does discomfort well.

“Aren’t you going to take the kids, too?”

“Those ungrateful little @&#^%. I’ve been worried sick about this and they had the nerve to complain about it. Complained about me being upset! I told them that they will be lucky to get a stinking thing for Christmas.  I have a good enough mind to take all their money and use it on tickets to go home and see my mom.  And I told them that, too. Serves them right”

She sucked in her breath and latched on to me, eye to eye. “I’ve been working on this letter all morning and it’s terrible.  YOU are such a good writer.  Write me something that will win this contest!  You can do it, I know you can!”

Now I was in a bad spot. This jabbering woman was wanting to me ghost write her entry into a contest being held by one of my competitors. Not only that, but I knew everyone on the staff and several could be counted as friends.  Screwing with another radio station’s contest is just inviting trouble and screwing over your friends is a good way not to have any. I told Monique that.

“I spend thousands and thousand of dollars on advertising with you!  The least you could do is help me!  I might not ever see my mother again!  Please, please you have to do this”

She kept at it like this for a while and, I hate to say, I gave in.  It was either that or listen to her blame me for her troubles over the next several weeks. Crazy people rule the world because of enablers like me.

I sat down at a typewriter in another office and stared at it. My Lord, this was a writing problem.  I have this woman who is oozing ugly, repellent, self-pity. I have to turn her, a woman who threatened to take away Christmas from her kids, into an object of sympathy.  I sat there feeling sorry myself and her kids when the key fell into my lap.

I began typing in a white heat.

Dear WBBQ,

I am writing about the Home for the Holidays Contest that you are having. I am not writing for myself. I am doing this for my Mom.   She has been very upset about my grandmother who lives up in Maine.

My grandmother’s name is Nanny. She has been sick a lot this year. Mom really wants to go to Maine to visit her. She is afraid that this will be our last chance to see Nanny at Christmas.

Maine is very far away and it costs a lot of money to get there. Mom says we don’t have enough to pay for it. My brother and I offered to give up our presents this year.  They could use that money to help pay for the trip. Mom said no and for us not to worry about it.  I could tell that we upset her. We didn’t mean to. We just wanted to help.

I heard about this contest on the radio today and asked her if I could write you.  She said yes.

Please pick my letter to be the winner. We really need to take my Mom Home for the Holidays.  This would be the best Christmas present you could ever give to anyone.

I looked at this thing that had sprung out of the typewriter. My God, what had I done?

I took it up front and held it out in front of me so that none of the evil could slip off the paper and on to my shoes. She lunged for the cheap copier paper.  She didn’t read it as much as just devour it. She started crying.

“I could see her doing this.  My sweet girl could have written this.  Oh I feel so bad now for being so mean to her last night.  I told her I was going to take away Christmas.  I am a terrible mother.” She paused and read it over again. “This letter is perfect! PERFECT!  Thankyouthankyouthankyou!”.

I made sure to keep the desk between me and her.  There was enough drama already without my being hugged for writing the biggest, fattest, lie I had ever written.

“Now you can not tell a soul that I wrote this,” I warned. “Not a soul. I will get in terrible trouble if you do.  Take this letter home and have Hannah write it up in her hand writing. She can change around the wording to be more like hers, but warn her not to add any begging or anything piteous.  It is an old actor’s trick. The less she cries — the more the audience will.”

So Monique took the letter home and Hannah read it and she cried, too.  Hannah, like a lot of us, is a sucker for being noble when it doesn’t cost anything.  She wrote it in her cute little girl curlicue hand writing and only changed a word or two.  They put the letter in the mail that night.

Her mom showed a copy around to all her friends and, with each telling, she and her daughter began to believe their own story. Her friends were amazed at the maturity that the 12 year old Hannah had shown and they cried over her being so brave to have written the radio station like that.

Christmas is a very hellish time in the radio business. You write commercials and you produce commercials and then you write and produce some more. You wonder if there are any more rabbits in that magic hat that you reach into every day for a new, fresh idea. An idea that will work for your client and that they will like.

Combine the stress of sales with the stress of creating and the stress of begging clients to pay their bill from last month so you can have Christmas this month and you have the reason why there are so many young people in radio. All the old ones… die.

So, it is not surprising that I forgot about that letter. I had not even thought of it for days until I was snatched out of sleep one morning by a phone call from Monique.

“We won! We won!  Oh my God, they just read her letter on the air!  We are all flying to Maine. Oh My God. Oh My God. You have given me the best present a person has ever given me.  The very best.  You are the most wonderful friend in the world and if you EVER tell ANYONE you wrote it I will kill you.  I will murder you.  You hear me?  Not a WORD!”

Man, that turned ugly quick.  I seem to remember telling HER not to tell anyone.

I laid in bed in complete shock. I had queered another radio station’s contest. Part of me was astonished and delighted over having authored a winning letter. The other half of me was ashamed that I had lent my good talents to such a low enterprise.

I went into work that morning and didn’t say anything.  I didn’t have to because all my co-workers were saying plenty. My client just won a major contest at a competitor.  Her child is only 12.  Did I have anything to do with this?

I denied it.

“Are you sure? She sounds mature for her age”.

I denied it more than three times.  I grabbed some copy and ran to a production studio supposedly to make more commercials, but really, to hide.

When I come out, there was much more poodah.  The poodah is what all the girls at the office call gossip.

According to the poodah, the owner of WBBQ had put in the fix on his own contest.  He had a letter from HIS client and that client had promised a fat 12 month advertising contract to make sure that HIS was the winning letter.

The staff of the radio station were outraged.  Here they had this letter from this darling little twelve year old girl that made them cry every time they read it and the boss had put the fix on.  She was so brave and so mature for her age and it was terrible, horrible that their boss was going to give it to a client in some dirty, underhanded deal.

They complained and plotted and schemed and when the time came, they broke into the owner’s office that morning and stole Hannah’s letter from his desk.  They read it on the air and awarded the prize to the darling little girl and her mom.

It was done.  Nothing could make it come back. The prize was awarded and it was glorious!  Que the singing angels!  Deck the Halls with Boughs of Folly!

When he finally woke up, late, as usual, the boss was livid and threatening to fire them all. A major, crooked, client was very hacked because he’d promised his family a nice Christmas trip and now would have to pay for it with his own after-tax dollars — of which he had plenty.

It was a very ugly scene at WBBQ.  Screaming, shouting, recriminations, door slamming, and people avoiding the halls. They were having the worst Christmas ever. I was the one who had delivered it or, at least, midwifed it: along with the corrupt owner and the crooked client and a wonderful, brave little girl who had conned them all.

My co-workers thought it was wickedly delightful and were jealous of the sales person who had the horrid crooked client on her list.  She could count on him giving her — The Budget.  They were looking forward to more firings and resignations as each one meant another client’s ad dollars would be ready to go to someone else — preferably, hopefully, with them.  Ho! Ho! Ho! Let’s go out for drinks to celebrate!

I just kept my mouth shut.  If word got out, an entire sleigh full of people would have a Merry, Merry Christmas as they roasted my chestnuts over an open funeral pyre.

It was 20 years ago today, roughly.  The statute of limitations for heaving stink bombs into a competitor’s radio station having run out, I feel safe to share this heart-warming story of Christmas betrayals past.  Radio is a nomadic business and most of the crew that broke down the door that morning do not live in Valdosta anymore.  In other words, they can’t lay their hands about my neck very easily.

They should be very proud of the truly noble thing they did that early morning. I wish I could say the same about my part, but I can’t.

The staff of WBBQ walked out in January when the commission checks for Christmas sales were cashed.  From the receptionist to the sales people to the DJ’s they all walked out the door without warning. Only the computers were left behind to run things.

The radio station owner had to go hire an entire new staff and he never again had such a talented group working for him.  The radio ad sales sharks moved in and ate his list of clients alive.  It was the rough justice of the radio world.

Hannah, Monique, Rob, Brother Bill, and Nanny had the most wonderful Christmas ever. I don’t think they ever told Nanny this story.

But I just told you.  If you wish, you can have a Merry, Merry Christmas roasting my chestnuts in the open readers forum below.  I certainly deserve it.

A Merry Christmas to you all!!!  and a radio-contest free New Year….

This post, btw, has been submitted to the Christmas Carnival over at Humor Bloggers.com.  All the Christmas humor starts on December 19.

Animal activists were horrified at a fraternity at the University of Georgia that “killed, skinned, cooked, and ate” a raccoon at a park in Athens. Just twenty miles from this keyboard in Echols County this is what is known as “supper”. It could well be opossum or armadillo on the half-shell — depending on what wild animal looked directly into the high powered Q-Beam floodlight as it shown over the baited field last night.

These people are also squealing about a drunken pet pig that was found on a campus. Getting your pet drunk has been going on as long as people have been getting drunk and have had pets. Would they have been upset if the frat boys had killed and eaten the pig? Aren’t the squeamish already asking that we anesthetize animals before slaughter?

In my fraternity we had a dog named “Dammit” because that was what we shouted at him all the time. Dammit acquired the taste for beer by licking up the normal spillage at the sloppy end of a televised football game. Before long, Dammit started begging when people opened a beer.

We thought it was cute until Dammit was alone one day and ripped open a case of beer. He bashed a six-pack around on its little plastic rings until something gave and spilled. Dammit picked up several unprintable nicknames after that one.

A meeting was held and it was decided that Dammit was going on the wagon. The next morning, he was locked up in one of the bedrooms. When we came back after lunch we found Dammit passed out on the floor with a broken bottle of Crown Royal he had smelled out from the top drawer of the dresser. Crown Royal — this was serious.

We chained Dammit up in the garage and made sure his chain run did not approach any alcohol. In our garage that took some doing and emptying the place took most of the afternoon as we carried empties and half empties to the garbage. Dammit howled and howled the entire time. We went inside and had a beer. When things got quiet outside someone went out and snuck a peek to find Dammit’s collar on the floor and no Dammit.

Oh, did we look and look for that dog. Oh, did we piss off so many people driving down their street shouting “Dammit! Dammit!” It took a week to find that dog and then only on a lucky break when some pledges spotted him hanging around outside of the ABC Liquor store begging for handouts.

It was time for professional help. We took the dog to a vet hoping he would have a canine drunk tank or maybe some doggy anabuse pills.

“Boys,” he said, looking over his glasses, “the only way I can stop this dog from drinking is to put him down. Once a dog is hooked on hooch, he’s history.” He stared at us and we stared at the floor and he made us promise not to spill beer on the floor anymore and let the dog drink it up.

We buried Dammit under a headstone made with beer cans. We didn’t swear off eating squirrel or frog legs, or possum, but we never again fed alcohol to a dog. Giving a monkey a lit cigarette? Ahhhhh, That’s another matter altogether….

Long before there were official “Redneck Games” there were just plain rednecks and the games they played for fun. The more violent and risky, the better: involving motor vehicles or weapons, the best.

An essential part of a young redneck’s driver education is how to do the 180. Driving in one direction, you pull on to the shoulder at high speed and with careful application of brake, steering wheel and accelerator you spin the car around 180 degrees and take off in the direction from whence you came. This is also known as a state patrol turn. Do it wrong and you can “turn turtle” and make the Lord’s ceiling your floor.

A less risky version of the 180 can be done with a Volkswagen Beetle just after a rain when the highway is slick. Pop in the clutch, pull up the emergency brake and give the wheel a little turn to the left and you will neatly swap ends. Now release the emergency brake and drop the clutch and you are moving backwards down the highway coming to a slow stop with your wheels spinning. This maneuver is so easy that Grandma can do it although you will need to increase her psychotropic medication to talk her into trying it.

My friends and I used to rationalize our “spinning a bug” by saying that it could save our lives in an emergency one day. It was one morning. We were sleepily cutting across a foggy grass field on the way for another day of work in a tobacco patch. We were munching on honey buns and cinnamon rolls with milk cartons and Yoo-Hoo in bottles when suddenly an irrigation pipe loomed up out of the cow path headed straight for us at fifty miles an hour. Allen quickly did the 180 and we spun up to the pipe in reverse and smacked it with the rear bumper in a low speed thwack. We had a hard time making out the fresh dent in the bumper from the old ones. The exhilaration of having cheated death was made all the sweeter by the vindication of our rainy day 180 training.

After a hot day in the tobacco patch, nothing cools you off like a Watermelon seed spitting contest. This is best done naked standing on the shallow side of the river off a sand bank. Take a huge chunk of ice cold watermelon and cram it into your mouth so hard that the rind rolls over your eyebrows and the loose parts slide down your wet body into the water. Slowly chew your cud until only the seeds are left. Now spit them at your partner. Ideally you are standing upriver from your partner so you don’t have to have his watermelon spit swirling around you. Extra points if you hit him in the eye.

So many redneck games are just target practice. Take the simple act of tossing your empty bottle o’ bud, co-cola, or belly washer out the window. This mundane littering of the landscape is much more fun when you have something to aim at like a stop sign, road sign, or mail box. No, you do not stop to toss the bottle at the stop sign you dumb Yankee — you run the stop sign at night at 70 miles per hour with your lights out because it is easier to see oncoming cars if the lights are out.

There is more than one way to toss your bottle. Showoffs sit on the windowsill with their body half out of the car. Purists keep their seat. Passengers either hang their right arms out of the car window dragging the bottle as close to the roadway as possible and flick the bottle up or they put their elbow on the windowsill with the bottle in their lap and flip it out. Drivers usually drag their left arms out the window and toss over the car or flick it out the passenger side window. The second method is if you really love the good old boy sitting in the passenger seat and want to show him how much you care.

Timing is essential and requires finesse. Do it right and you hear a clanging, metallic, dopplered, thwack as the sound tries to catch back up to your speeding ear. On occasion the bottle shatters. Should the bottle hit the top bolt on the sign and the bolt give way and the sign end up swinging upside down reflecting your red tail lights in your rear view mirror you have accomplished the one-in-a-million shot and can now honorably retire..

You can cheat. Stand in the back of a pickup truck and toss larger items like Gatorade bottles full of piss or watermelons or a borrowed trash can weighted with sand or water. Things blow apart in lovely ways and the randomness of it is intoxicating and addictive. Wise old rednecks create their rural mailboxes of concrete or pig iron.

All of this target practice prepared me for life as I found out when I was really broke and desperate and took a job delivering afternoon newspapers on a motor route for the Valdosta Daily Times. I have never truly forgiven them for hiring me.

They gave me a book of yellow cards with each card a subscriber’s permanent record and desires. Page after page of admonitions about where to put the paper. Porch, Porch, Porch, Porch and Driveway — avoid the puddle. In the golden tinged days of the 40’s, tidy young men would ride up and place the paper gently on the porch, but this was the 70’s and it was all about me.

My subscribers got a battled beige Volkswagen Beetle roaring down the street at forty miles per hour because the law spots you five mph over the limit. Hand and eye keenly trained from years of bottle tossing at 70 miles per hour and I was in the zone with everything moving in slow motion. I drove with my knees while popping each paper up against the steering column and rolling it tightly. The rubber bands clung to the cigarette lighter knob on the dash because I didn’t want to disturb my dial position on the radio. The Jeff Morgan show was on Tiger Radio 1450 WVLD complete with spring reverb backing each song and a gong sound every time Jeff gave the time. I listened to bubble gum, chewed bubble gum, and spat papers over the roof and out the passenger window.

Toss a paper straight from a car and there is that timeless period when it moves along with you as it fades away towards its destination. Each perfect throw is a ballet of trajectory. A throw begins in the middle of the next door neighbors yard. You throw it straight, not tumbling and you fly along with it on its path to the target. There are blind throws when you approach the porch from around a corner or the paper has to clear a hedge before rumbling to a stop in front of the door. There is a way to hit each porch and you find that way with daily practice.

Not every throw was perfect. The imperfect ones, though, stay with me like so many upside down swinging signs glowing red in my mirror. There was the paper that hit the chain holding the hanging pot and the pot landing squarely on the rail. There was the blind throw that revealed an entire row of rednecks rocking on their porch in Remerton. The paper flew at eye level down the line and the last person reached out and caught it. There was the house on the curve with a young girl sitting sweetly on the step when the paper came flying out of nowhere and hit her in the crotch. I stopped collecting at that house because her father took to stepping out on the porch and shaking his fist at me.

Collections was a bother. My route was through the poorer parts of town and I was always being stiffed by my customers and, in consequence, in hock with the newspaper. I lived off of cash flow, not profit. Along with the mounting debts were the rising complaints about the paper landing on porches so firmly that it shook the house. There was the cop who made me go back and apologize to the old man who took a shot between the eyes when I missed his postage stamp sized porch and he stepped out from the wrong side of the house at the wrong time. .

I had to take out a loan in order to quit. It is amazing to me that liberal, self righteous, institutions like newspapers take such advantage of young people. A paperboy is an “independent contractor” who earns no benefits and pays all his social security. The Times kindly sells him the papers and allows him to take the hit if the subscriber doesn’t pay. If it rains, he buys the bags. He is even forced to buy the rubber bands. This teaches him about life. It teaches him that employers, and especially newspapers, will screw you if they can.

I had to quit because I found a job and my past was catching up to me or because my past was catching up to me and I needed another job. I sold the Volkswagen to the circulation manager and, out of loyalty to me, it tossed a rod on the way home. That was just a down payment as the Times and I are still not even.

Redneck games prepared me for working as a newspaper boy. The newspaper gig prepared me for modern corporate life. I can now talk on the Sprint phone, look at my palm pilot, and take notes while zipping from place to place pell-mell and productive. Who would have thunk it? Redneck games prepared me for life.

This is the tale of a man whose bad karma made the computers attack him.

Computers run most of America and do a better job that we ever did. Even their mistakes are better. A digit moves and your seventy dollar cable bill grows to seven hundred dollars, or your services are cut off for no reason, or you start getting lots of mail offering you credit even though your credit rating is somewhere south of the equator.

John, not his real name but my friend insists that this is a true story, worked at a natural gas company. He was high up in the management food chain, but his people skills reminded one of an elephant. He stepped on people and didn’t even notice the damage.

One summer of a group of middle managers at John’s company were taking a class on the new computer system. The new system controlled everything in the company. As software goes it was a real Swiss Army knife.  The IT department took the accounts of some employees, scrubbed the financial data, and made a dummy database for use in training. Since they were using employees, no privacy rules were violated.

The people in that room hated John. They gave him a bad credit rating, created poor payment records, turned off his gas for non-payment, and moved him to the worst parts of town. All this was done as practice for handling real world situations.

They were much kinder to themselves.  They presented each other with high credit ratings, excellent bill paying history, massive credit balances, and strong product usage so they would get preferential treatment. It was all in fun.

The fun stopped one cold January night when they converted all the records from the old program and fed them into the new one and then slapped that sucker on line. Somehow, the training database got mixed up with the real one. Within days, John’s life went to hell. On the coldest day of the year, the computers ordered that John’s gas be turned off and that he will never be allowed to have gas heat again in this lifetime.

When John called the customer service department in India they refused to believe that he wasn’t the most despicable customer in the entire company, if not the world. John had no heat, no hot water, no gas fired logs, and the power had just gone out in an ice storm. The only source of heat in the house was John and he was livid.

John was screaming at the people at headquarters. Someone high up made a call to someone equally exalted and a service team was dispatched with over-time to turn on the gas in the dead of night.

The next day, the computer ordered his gas turned off again and the meek, unquestioning, low paid contractors who did turn-offs complied. This time John called the head of customer care and again his gas was turned on, but that was quickly corrected by the computer the next day.

A geek team was called in and they destroyed all record that John was ever a customer of any gas company at anytime and then they created him a solid gold VIP account of the type reserved for the President of the United States.

If this had been John’s across the street neighbor with these problems, that guy would have been reduced to busting up the furniture and burning it while waiting for spring to arrive.

One of the training class middle managers was friendly with the geeks and moved quickly to get them to cover the tracks so that John would never find out who did him in.  This guy didn’t have to buy lunch for months as each manager in turn took turns paying him off for his quick action.

They could afford lunch because they had not paid a gas bill in months due to their huge credit balances. Karma is a wonderful thing.