Sucker Deal

Some people like the television show, The Power of Ten. In fact, some people love it so much that they have been known to show up at a taping and try to accost Mr. Drew Carey. Not me.

While I like Mr. Drew Carey and would love to chat with someone who had actually touched him, I prefer the NBC show, Deal or No Deal. Don't get me wrong, I find Howie Mandel very annoying and the show terribly contrived. What I enjoy are the imbeciles that routinely piss away a lot of money in the hope of getting more. My favorites are those who leave empty handed.

People who study lottery winners will tell you that they almost invariably waste their good fortune and wind up broke. Deal or No Deal puts the level of stupidity shown by lotto winners on display for the nation to see. Someone said that winning the lottery doesn't change you, it makes you more of what you are. If you were a poor money manager, it just gives you more to mismanage.

Deal or No Deal, as you may know, involves a contestant selecting one case from a group of twenty-eight cases, in hopes of selecting the one million-dollar case. The object is to then open the remaining twenty-seven cases without uncovering the one containing a million bucks. Along the way the contestants are offered various sums of money to stop. The amounts offered depend on how many high-dollar cases remain unopened. The more high-value cases left unopened, the more the offer.

Regular people don't get to be on the show; you have to exhibit a certain freak factor. Take for example the woman on the show that I watched this morning. Yes, I admit it, I Tivo the show.

She was a mother of three from Florida. She had divorced her husband but was planning to remarry him. She wanted to win enough to pay off her divorce attorney and still have a bit of cash. She said that she was always strapped for money. She was pretty, a bit chunky and just as sweet a Southern Belle as you would ever want to meet. At least on the show. In real life who knows?

At one point in the game she had a chance to leave with $135,000. Her remaining unopened cases were the $1,000,000 one, plus $500, $200 and $50. Rather than accept the $135,000, likely more money than she has ever seen, she forged on. She left with a hundred bucks, after opening the $1,000,000 case on her next pick.

It always amazes me that people will go for that little bit extra and lose it all.

I resumed my regular routine today. I drove Son Sneed to the doctor, unpacked from the trip, did my laundry and dusted a little bit.

Later in the morning Peterson called to ask me to come to Daughter Sneed's house to help move the dead her washing machine into the garage. The washer had stopped draining and the prognosis was not good.

We dragged it into the garage, removed the front panel and decided that the pump was shot. We took off the pump and discovered that a very small stone had become jammed in the impeller. I got the rock unstuck and the pump jumped back to life. I love it when things work out without a repairman.

Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky