Dear, sweet Stephanie,I am writing to let you know how thrilled I am that you have been reunited with your Blackberry. Finding it on the street gave me the opportunity to teach my child a valuable life lesson.
That's right Stephanie – may I call you Steph? I feel so close to you right now. Thanks to you, Steph, my child now understands that the world is indeed a cruel place full of ungrateful morons such as yourself – and that doing the right thing is sadly, sometimes, a big fucking waste of time and energy.
How can I ever repay you for teaching him, at the tender age of 14, that spontaneous acts of kindness toward strangers can get lost, when wasted on tactless people such as yourself and the delightfully clueless asshole you sent to retrieve your precious handheld device.
Why, just imagine the temptation, at 14, to be selfish and keep the coveted lost item valued at $549. The little bastard, as he is affectionately known, showed me how easy it was to replace his SIM card with yours and voila! a free upgrade to a fancy new phone. I had to remind him how wrong that would be and the shiny new Blackberry would have bad karma (if you believe in such things) and worse – some sweet soul such as yourself would be greatly inconvenienced and lose valuable information – perhaps contact with your closeted lesbian lover, or the orphaned child with the harelip you sponsor in Guatemala.
I also had to remind him how violated we felt when our iPhone was stolen by the juvenile delinquent down the road, and how replacing such expensive items can cause financial hardship and ill feelings toward said juvenile delinquent and the satanic pocket molesters at Rogers.
When I jokingly mentioned to the deliriously stupid young man you sent to fetch the Blackberry, how tempting it was to keep the found item, his response was "You should have." Apparently, we were told, where you work, Blackberrys are handed out as freely as condoms at a gay pride parade. Furthermore, imagine my delight to hear you work at a government-funded institution and my tax money is spent so freely, keeping up to date with the latest electronics you so carelessly drop on the sidewalk. I was giddy with happiness at your good fortune and had to drive to the NSLC for a pint of gin to drop in my tonic.
Steph, I think your parents wanted a boy and you were supposed to be Stephen, but let it go because it's a beautiful day and you have your Blackberry back, without so much as even a "thank you" – which, by the way, is a common courtesy taught to most children before they can pick their nose and eat it. And a small reward was out of the question, so it's a good thing you didn't offer up even a cheap bottle of wine because that would have been unnecessarily thoughtful, and we wouldn't have accepted it anyway. We were just doing what was right. So Steph, perhaps today while you are watching the clock with your Blackberry vibrating underneath you, all the while surfing the net at the taxpayer's expense, you should think outside the cubicle by checking out Matt Whitman's website: www.mattwhitman.com.
Matt, unlike yourself, has devoted his life to doing what's right. His methods may be a tad more Bible thumpy than my own, but the concept of helping others get ahead in this shallow litterbox of a world is the same. Matt invented the business model, Reverse Networking – the concept being the promotion of others rather than one's-self. Imagine how selfless that is, Steph! In Matt's words, "If I say I am the best whatever, you discount it because I am saying it. If someone else says something nice about me it is much more authentic….” Whitman continues, “The key is not just “who you know” anymore, it is who you know that is saying good things about you!”
And boy-oh-boy, could I ever say some terrific things about you today (note the sarcasm, Steph, you ignorant, ungrateful twat) but I won't, because it's Friday and my faith in humanity is alive and kicking, despite taking one up the ass when I bent over to pick up your Blackberry.
Yours truly,
halifaxbroad@gmail.com
