Some years ago I worked for a beer distributorship. At Christmastime, our management gave each employee a ham as a gift for the season. I told the wife about this and she asked when I was going to bring ours home. Being the mindless person that I am, I kept forgetting to bring the ham home. This stretched on for several weeks. In utter and absolute frustration, she put her foot down and demanded that I bring home the ham that evening. To that end, I wrote many sticky notes and attached them to everything imaginable to remind me to bring home the ham.
This time I remembered. Proudly, I walked to the refrigerated warehouse where the gift hams were stored and looked on the shelf where mine should have been and saw none of them left. I asked the warehouse guy where mine was and he told me that it had fallen off the shelf, was run over by a forklift and discarded.
Great.
True to form, the wife was waiting for me at the front door of our house and by the look on her face, she had a purpose. It didn't take a Harvard scholar to figure out what the first words out of her mouth would be. Stupidly thinking that she would be completely understanding of the fact that the ham met its demise under the wheels of a forklift, I told her the truth as to the fate of the protein mass that used to be a walking, breathing pig.
Let me rewind for a moment. My parents instilled in me the belief that honesty is the best policy. Since my childhood I have been hard-wired to believe that that is true. Until the ham incident, honesty had never failed me. This time, however, I saw the true advantages of being a good liar. Since this incident, I have thought of many ways that I could have bypassed the scorn of a wife who was denied her five-pound Christmas ham. I won't bore you with all of the lies that I could have told. Instead, I'll tell you only the best one.
If I had the opportunity to do it over, I would have come home and told the wife that all I could think about on the way home from work that day was how lucky we have it. We have a nice home, wonderful friends, good health and a loving family. On the flip side, there are many less fortunate people who would greatly appreciate a Christmas ham for their holiday dinner. So, I donated the ham to the local homeless shelter. This was a story that couldn't have missed, making me a man among men, generous to a fault, a pillar of the community.
That would have been a great ploy other than the fact that she would have seen right through it. Maybe honesty is, truly, the best policy.
Or, I could have just stopped at the grocery store on the way home, spent the five dollars and bought a damned ham.
Readers, enjoy your day.
Let me rewind for a moment. My parents instilled in me the belief that honesty is the best policy. Since my childhood I have been hard-wired to believe that that is true. Until the ham incident, honesty had never failed me. This time, however, I saw the true advantages of being a good liar. Since this incident, I have thought of many ways that I could have bypassed the scorn of a wife who was denied her five-pound Christmas ham. I won't bore you with all of the lies that I could have told. Instead, I'll tell you only the best one.
If I had the opportunity to do it over, I would have come home and told the wife that all I could think about on the way home from work that day was how lucky we have it. We have a nice home, wonderful friends, good health and a loving family. On the flip side, there are many less fortunate people who would greatly appreciate a Christmas ham for their holiday dinner. So, I donated the ham to the local homeless shelter. This was a story that couldn't have missed, making me a man among men, generous to a fault, a pillar of the community.
That would have been a great ploy other than the fact that she would have seen right through it. Maybe honesty is, truly, the best policy.
Or, I could have just stopped at the grocery store on the way home, spent the five dollars and bought a damned ham.
Readers, enjoy your day.
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