The Gift of Disappointment

It was one of those sultry mornings that you read about in a Faulkner novel. The air was heavy like a steambath at 7:30am and not a cloud in the sky to offer the hope of any relief from the scorching sun. But this is not Mississippi, I mused, this is Massachusetts. This global warming thing is real - and we need to find someone to blame.

The crew was already inside when I arrived at the new doublewide that I call my office. We had it shipped-in last week, compliments of FEMA. They had a lot of surplus trailers leftover from the Katrina affair, so I applied for one. No questions asked, they shipped it in by helicopter.

I love the spacious windows and of course the air conditioning will make these stifling dog days of summer almost bearable. The crew was also pleased to move-up from the old cobb shack. We dismantled it and stored it in the seasonal storage area, just in case some snoopy auditer figures-out where the doublewides went. Such oversight is highly unlikely, but you never know.

We had already used the Homeland Security grant to upgrade our dumpsters. We called in a design consultant who thought stainless steel would look really state of the art. This created a bit of a conundrum as no one knew how to dispose of used dumpsters. After some brainstorming we came up with a solution. We floated them down the Charles River out to the Boston harbor on barges, and then, well, splash.
We like to think of them as an "artificial reef".


This morning, the guys were buzzing this morning about the big dig. A section of ceiling in the tunnel crashed down on a car one morning last week, killing a woman. The newspapers and TV crews were delighted to have some real breaking news. They were all aflutter with interviews with experts, grieving relatives, and of course live video of workmen standing in front of a pile of rubble.

And of course there were the politicians. The Gov cancelled his vacation and traveling plans. He expressed some surprise that the big dig had actually been open and operational for several years. But he is a busy man and does not get into Boston that often since he has been running for President on 2008. The attourny General, who BTW is a candidate for Gov, called press conferences to announce that his office was investigating the entire Big Dig as a "crime scene." He immediately ordered 30,000,000 yards of yellow tape and closed the tunnels to traffic indefinitely. Everyone pointed fingers at the current Turnpike Authority Chairman, who declared that the tunnels are 96% safe. "A few cave-ins every now and then are to be expected." He noted that "hundreds of people die from bee stings every year and only one person has died in tunnel collapses . So what's the big friggin' deal?"

George was annoyed. "Getting to the Race track will be a pain in the ass of months."
"Not to mention the Airport," I added.

Lardass recalled Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ recent announcement that he wants to give most of his fortune away to help others. "How about giving some of the cash to fix the tunnels?"

George scowled "First maybe he should give some of it to Microsoft to get them to fix some of the security flaws in Windows."

Bill (not the Microsoft founder) was wearing wearing his anti-bird-flu mask. He looked like Japanese railway commuter. "Any one got any aspirin?" 

In the morning paper there was a letter asking about the protocol for giving lottery tickets as a gift. A mother had received some scratch tickets from her daughter as a birthday present. One of the tickets paid $10,000. The mother gave $2,000 of it to the daughter as a generous gesture of appreciation. The daughter was pissed. "You should give me half!" she demanded. "But I thought it was a gift," explained the mother. Now the daughter will not talk to the mother. And the mother wishes she had gotten a potholder or flowers instead of the scratch tickets.

There is an inherent problem with giving lottery tickets as gifts. Odds are you are giving disappointment. But in the unlikely event that the recipient hits it big, you are expecting a kickback, right? So really it is just a cynical, selfish way of making others as unhappy and disappointed as you are. You sorry cheap bastard.