Observations

Finger Food

by The Windjammer

I am about to break a longstanding tradition with myself and start commenting on something about which I know nothing except that which I have heard and seen on that most informative of all media, the tube which many of us have nicknamed "Boob."

I just saw that the woman who claimed to have found a piece of finger in her bowl of Wendy’s chili has been arrested.

What I say from this point forward is all based on hearsay evidence from the aforementioned reliable source, and if you have had half as much experience with hearsay as I have, you will know that most of it should be "hear" and none of it "say."

She is said to have now been charged with grand larceny and attempted larceny.

The only way in this uphill and downtrodden state where I live that you can be charged with such serious offenses is for someone to believe that you did something wrong--BIG TIME. Grand means that it wasn’t penny ante or even dollar wise or pound foolish.

It has been reported that the too-short finger originally belonged to a woman in another state who still has the stub to prove it. It allegedly disappeared from a pickle (not as in dill) jar in a Las Vegas emergency room. As Sherlock might have said to Watson, it is elementary that the mysterious disappearance must have been engineered with malice aforethought.

Wendy’s apparently did a lot of finger pointing on their own and determined that the pointy digit didn’t come from anyone in their food chain, to coin a pun. Missing fingers leave telltale evidence and none of the employees et alii who could have contributed to the potential loss of millions in tort suits had the necessary stub to prove that any had lost one of their digits.

If you think that Wendy’s wasn’t in danger of losing a chunk of their wherewithal, try to recall the incident of a few years back when a woman put her coffee where it had no business being and won a judgment against MacDonald’s because she scalded her cuisse. I have been burdened ever since with having to drink lukewarm coffee, even when I make it my self. Try to imagine what could have happened if the subject had been able to cough and gag a couple of times in front of reliable witnesses and then spit out about half of a pickled finger.

This nation has been burdened for a few decades now with folks who think they can get rich quick at someone else’s expense and that as a result of their windfall, no one suffers. I had an old editor who repeated a saying I heard years ago, "There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch," or TANSTAFL, as he wrote it. The saying has been attributed to Milton Friedman, also spelled Anon. I am not sure who coined it, if either Jim or Milt. Regardless of the originator, it is an established truth. I learned that long ago when I worked for a dollar a day (10 hours on end) and all the free hard cider I could drink because there wasn’t any water nearby. Believe you me, you always pay in both the long run and the short run for drinking too much hard cider on an empty stomach. There were times when I just couldn’t find a tree big enough.

So it is with groundless or contrived tort suits. Somebody has to foot the bill.

That someone is going to be you. You can bet your crooked forefinger that it won’t be anyone such as GM, Wendy’s, Pfizer or Ford. They don’t have a thin dime unless they can first snitch it from you.

I’m pleased that they caught the perpetrator in the act. She must have left her fingerprints.