I'm a believer

A friend was amused by my mention of a woman who thought that corned beef came from taking a little calf and feeding it only corn all of its life until it was time to head to the deli, if you know what I mean.

Yes, folks, I knew that woman, and to tell the truth, the first time she told me she wouldn't eat corned beef for that reason, I laughed and thought she was making a joke.  But no.

Then came the time that a friend told me he had found a really great side hustle. He had answered a magazine ad that promised an income of thousands of dollars a month for stuffing envelopes, so he paid some crook with a post office box (they all have them) a couple of hundred dollars for his starting kit.

I think that Og the caveman knew better than to fall for that old scheme. The way it works - it's kind of a pyramid scheme - you are supposed to stuff envelopes with a letter that says "Please send me money and I will tell you how to make money stuffing envelopes." If anyone is dumb enough to send you money, that's how you make money.  There aren't more than three or four rubes in every county in the country, though, so you'd better buy plenty of envelopes and stamp!

But this fellow really believed that companies needed legitimate mail to be stuffed into envelopes and that they couldn't find anyone around the office to do it, so they would ship him boxes full of letters and envelopes into which he could stuff those letters while watching "Andy Griffith" reruns in the evening.

By the way, the easier scheme is like this, and it has been done: You take out an ad in some periodical read by the easily-fooled segment of the populace (<<<); the ad will say "I made a fortune by direct mail - send $1 and a SASE for complete info!" and list a post office box (see above.)  Then, you print up some fliers saying, "Take out an ad and tell people to send you a dollar for information on how to make a fortune in direct mail," stick it in that SASE, and stop off at the bank after you mail them from the post office and empty out your p.o. box full of dollar bills.

Of course, we were all told that it's illegal to drive at night with the dome light on in your car, that watermelons will grow in your stomach if you swallow a seed, that you had to wait an hour after eating before you went swimming, and that you could die if you got a cut on your foot and were not wearing white socks.

None of this explains why we think that we have to turn down the volume on the car stereo to find a location.