August 6, 1993
Dear Everyone:
Welcome to Further Adventures in
Deposition Reporting. You'll
recall in our last Adventure, our plucky reporter was dealing with the
case of Ms. Airhead who, despite the fact that she had never married Mr.
Scuzbucket, wished to divorce him anyway.
Today, we join our plucky reporter as she meets the frolicsome,
fun-loving Scungewort* family. Back
in the carefree 1980s, Mr. Scungewort was a flourishing entrepreneur who
specialized in the transportation of controlled substances intended
primarily for recreational purposes. For
a time, Mr. Scungewort also dabbled in horticulture, planting,
nourishing and harvesting additional controlled substances (All
Natural!), also intended primarily for recreational use.
Mr. Scungewort did very well at his business, amassing large quantities
of money which had the slight difficulty of always being in cash.
Of course, you can see Mr.
Scungewort’s problem: What to do
with all that cash?
Put it in the bank? Don't be
silly. Banks have a funny way of
thinking that it's 0K for them to ask such intensely personal questions
as, "Say, just where did all this (cash) money come from, anyway?"
Mr. Scungewort could hardly
attribute it all to a lemonade stand, now could he?
It's furthermore, banks use
computers, which have a way of talking to other computers, including the
Internal Revenue Service’s computers. And
the IRS would really want to know where all that (cash) money came from.
So Mr. Scungewort invested his wealth in such ventures as cheap teenage
slasher movies, generally filmed at "deserted" summer camps, where the
(scantily-clad) cast and crew could be inexpensively housed right on the
set. Mr. Scungewort also invested
a lot of money in the walls of the houses he happened to be occupying.
Occasionally, Mr. Scungewort wanted to spend his money on something more
substantial and that's where the two Scungewort daughters come into the
picture. There was also a Mrs.
Scungewort but she's departed. Whether
this means that she died, or that she just got disgusted and departed,
was not make clear to me. That
leaves the daughters: The
Daughter He Doted On and the Daughter He Largely Ignored.
Daddy Scungewort gave the Daughter He Doted On (and her husband) the
wherewithal to make a down payment on a house with a fashionable address
in Walnut Creek. (By definition,
all addresses in Walnut Creek are fashionable.)
From time to time, when the
Daughter He Doted On (and her husband) couldn't quite come up with
enough to make the mortgage payments, Daddy would hand over a few large
bills and that would take care of it. Meanwhile,
he ignored the Daughter He Largely Ignored.
Time passes. Mrs. Scungewort
departed. Mr. Scungewort’s
business departed. Mr. Scungewort
used up all the money that he had stashed in the walls of various houses
and is now living in a flop in a very unfashionable section of Richmond.
Mr. Scungewort has decided that,
since he put up the money in the first place, he should now take the
house that the Daughter He Doted On (and her husband) has been living in
and sell it for quite a lot of money than they paid for it.
The Daughter He Doted On has suddenly decided she doesn't remember Daddy
at all and refuses to give up her fashionable address in Walnut Creek.
Daddy has engaged the services of
a lawyer from something along the lines of "Richmond Legal Aid Society
for the Poor and Indigent". (Our
plucky reporter hears this and thinks, "Oh, *#$%!
They’re
not going to want to pay for a transcript.")
Meanwhile,
the Daughter He Largely Ignored has gone off, very well, and is now
living in a very fashionable
community that the Daughter He Doted On could never afford.
One of those affluent
neighborhoods with gates and guards to make sure that people like Daddy
never get inside the walls. Thus
proving once again that the very best revenge is living well.
Of course, her husband, upon learning that his recently-rediscovered
father-in-law is a broken down former drug dealer, living in a flop
house, responded with considerable compassion, by ordering his wife to
have nothing to do with her (former) family, a directive she would
gladly have obeyed had it not been for the subpoena in her hand.
You see, both daughters had been called in by the lawyers for
depositions, something neither wanted to do.
In fact, one got the impression
that they didn't want to be in the same room with each other or Daddy
Scungewort. Although, it did
provide them an opportunity to indulge in a little sibling rivalry, to
wit: Which one of us can shaft
Daddy the fastest and deepest?
So the next time you think you yourself, "I have
such a rotten family!", think again.
It could be worse.
In other news…
My RMSEP Team has moved forward to the point that we will only be
meeting to attend demonstrations by vendors who hope we will select
their product (our first cut yielded 10 possible software packages out
of something over 100). Consequently,
I won't be able to count on working in “Pleasant Hille” every Thursday
for a while. The Good News is:
We're much further along than I
expected (feared) we would be by now.
Love, as always,
Pete
*Not their real name, of course.
Any resemblance to Scungeworts past, present or future, is purely
coincidental.
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