You can’t get something for nothing unless you bought a lottery ticket and defied the billion to one odds to win $347 million. It’s taken me a lifetime of lessons before I learned that nothing is free. For example, at least three times I’ve been suckered by an e-mail that tells me I’ve won a 50-inch tv set or a laptop computer or a $500 meal voucher at Red Lobster or Olive Garden. I’d go to the website, ever the naïve optimist, and all I had to do was answer a few questions and then the prize would be mine. Actually, the questions were a poll of my preferences, followed by the offer to buy something or subscribe to one or more magazines. I’d politely decline all the offers and a message would coax me onward with just a few more questions before I could claim my prize. Each time I’d decline and click the “continue” button, only to discover that there was another page of questions and requests to buy. After going through this process five or six times, I’d realize I’d been scammed. I was never going to get what they were offering. But I fell for it three times. Another example. We got a flier from Arrowhead Honda in the mail, with three scratch-off boxes. If any of the boxes matched the magic number, we were winners. Naturally, one of the boxes matched up with the winning numbers. The prizes were a new car, $5,000, a 55” Sony 3-D tv, a Sony Vaio touch screen pc, a 64 gigabyte iPad, or a $500 Target gift card. Hey! Okay, we won at least $500! Right? Wrong. In looking more carefully at the prize description, I noticed that the Target gift card was “up to $500.” It’s the “up to” that gets you. Guess what, every one of the fliers would have the wining number, and when some poor sucker like me, who didn’t read the fine print, went to Arrowhead Hondo for his prize, he’d find that after a typical hard-sell from one of the salesmen, he’d won a $10 Target gift card. See, even though you got ten bucks, you had to pay for it with your precious time listening to the hard sell. You can’t get something for nothing. Lesson learned. Pass it on.
I've always collected errors in diction, things people mis-hear, like "windshield factor" and "the next store neighbors." Years ago, one of my students wrote an essay in which she described the world as being harsh and cruel, "a doggy-dog world." I've since come to think she may have been more astute and accurate than those who describe it in the usual way. My Stories - Mobridge Memories -
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Most of what I've written has been published as e-books and is available at Amazon. Match Play is a golf/suspense novel. Dust of Autumn is a bloody one set in upstate New York. Prairie View is set in South Dakota, with a final scene atop Rattlesnake Butte. Life in the Arbor is a children's book about Rollie Rabbit and his friends (on about a fourth grade level). The Black Widow involves an elaborate extortion scheme. Happy Valley is set in a retirement community. Doggy-Dog World is my memoir. And ES3 is a description of my method for examining English sentence structure.
In case anyone is interested in any of my past posts, an archive list can be found at the bottom of this page. I'd appreciate any feedback you may have by sending me an e-mail note--jertrav33@aol.com. Thanks for your interest.
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