The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in a normal fashion. The man sued and won!
In delivering his ruling, the judge stated that since the man held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable, and also guaranteed that it would insure the cigars against fire, without defining what it considered to be “unacceptable fire,” it was obligated to compensate the insured for his loss.
Rather than endure a lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the judge’s ruling and paid the man $15,000 for the rare cigars lost in “the fires.” After the man cashed his check, however, the insurance company had him arrested…on 24 counts of arson! With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used as evidence against him, the man was convicted of intentionally burning the rare cigars and sentenced to 24 consecutive one year terms.
Most people would grasp the flaws in law and logic involved in this story of what one commentator has called “cigarson” nevertheless, the tale does satisfy our notions of what it takes to fight the system, plus how the system fights back and wins most of the time.
Published reports of legitimate settlements of class-action suits against big companies sometimes spill over into legend land, where the facts are merrily mixed with fantasy, and a whole new set of specifics may emerge. A case in point is a 1996 settlement involving the pricing of infant formulas. On January 1, 1997, at just about the time the deadline for filing claims expired, a new twist in the story was faxed, E-mailed, phoned, and posted all across the country. Supposedly, Gerber Products Company, which had absolutely no involvement in the formula suit, had been ordered to give every child under twelve years of age a savings bond or cash in amounts ranging from $500 to $1,500. All the parents had to do was forward a copy of the child’s birth certificate and Social Security card to a post office box in Minneapolis. Take a look at the “Gerber in the News” page on the Gerber Products World Wide Web page to see their blunt denial. Business folklore may often be funny, but it’s no fun fighting back.
* * *
“Lego ‘homeless’ rumor false”
Chicago Tribune [distributed to news sources in January 1992]
The rumor was persistent: In an effort to be more relevant, Lego, maker of those colorful interlocking blocks, had added a plastic, homeless person to some of its kits.
FAO Schwarz heard it. So did Marshall Field’s. A salesperson at Toys R Us even said it was “to teach kids sensitivity and compassion.”
But a spokesman for Lego was confident that such gritty realities of urban life never would be packed into each box, which stretches children’s imaginations from medieval England to the outer reaches of the galaxy.
“Oh, there must be some mistake,” said the spokesman. “You see, only smiling, happy people live in Legoland.”
* * *
“The Bedbug Letter”
My recent essay on “duck letters” has brought forth the classic of that species. Thanks to Ernest R. Kaswell, of Reston [Virginia], for passing it along.
In case you’ve never had the pleasure of receiving one, “duck letters” appear to offer up great compassion and hasty action in response to whatever you’ve requested. In fact, they are designed to hug your request to death in an avalanche of words. They duck, even as they appear to help. Of course, Capitol Hill offices and government agencies are past masters of the art.
Anyway, Ernest says the classic (and perhaps original) duck letter is “The Bedbug Letter.”
Before airplane travel became routine, Ernest recalls, business executives traveled by train. They slept in berths in Pullman cars.
What would happen, Ernest says, is that Mr. Jones would have dinner and a drink in the dining car, then retire to his bedroom for the evening. “A couple of hours later, he feels itchy, starts to scratch, sits up, turns on the light and finds that the bed is infested with bedbugs,” Ernest writes.
“He calls the porter and conductor. They apologize, but say they can’t give him another bunk because the train is sold out. So he sits up all night in the club car, gets off the train in Chicago, is mad as hell and fires off a letter to the president of the Pullman Company in New York.
What comes back is a letter that fairly drips with abject caring and regret.
“We are very sorry about your experience,” it says. “Be assured that we do everything possible to keep our beds and facilities absolutely immaculate, and we do apologize for this unusual situation. We hope this does not cause you to stop traveling by Pullman. Try us again, and we know you will have a more pleasant experience.”
There’s only one trouble. A note is attached to the letter with a paper clip. Obviously, it’s an interoffice memo that should have been removed but wasn’t. It reads:
“Bill, send this SOB the bedbug letter.”
From “Bob Levey’s Washington,” the Washington Post, May 6, 1993. The term “duck letters” is new to me. I replaced Levey’s string of symbols representing profanity with the more common term, “SOB.” Usually the quoted letter is more detailed, reporting actions like these: “[The car] has been stripped of all furnishings. The bedding, upholstery, curtains, carpet, and all other combustible materials have been burned. The toilets and their fixtures have been scrubbed down and sterilized with carbolic acid. By the time you receive this letter, the car will have been fumigated and steam cleaned from end to end…the responsible personnel have been reprimanded, docked two weeks’ wages, and assigned to refresher training….” Sometimes the original letter of complaint is accidentally sent back with the reply, and it bears a rubber stamp reading “Send the bug letter.” In other versions the routing memo refers to the passenger as “this jerk” or “this dame.” The story has been reported from the 1940s and was probably popular even earlier. A tongue-in-cheek letter to the editor in the Princeton Alumni Weekly for February 5, 1992, even claims that “The Bedbug Letter” dates to 1889 and attributes it directly to George M. Pullman, the president of the sleeping-car company.
“Red Velvet Cake”
Red Velvet Cake and Its Story
The story behind this cake is both interesting and expensive. It seems that a woman from Seattle was dining at the Waldorf-Austoria Hotel in New York and was deeply impressed with the cake served to her one evening. It looked like red velvet with a beautiful white frosting. She asked them if they would send her the recipe. They did, but it arrived C.O.D. with a charge of $300! She paid the cost and then consulted her lawyer who told her she could do nothing to get her money back. Since the price of the recipe had been costly to her, she decided all her friends should enjoy baking and eating this luscious and extravagant Red Velvet Cake.
Red Velvet Cake
1/2 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 ozs. red coloring
2 Tbsp. cocoa
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup buttermilk
2 1/4 cups sifted cake flour
1 Tbsp. vinegar
1 level tsp. soda
Cream shortening, sugar, eggs. Make a paste of cocoa and food coloring and add to the cream mixture. Mix salt and vanilla with buttermilk and add alternately with flour to the cream mixture. Then mix soda and vinegar and fold into the mixture. Do not beat. Bake in two 9-inch pans, greased and floured. Bake 20 min. at 350 degrees.
Frosting
5 Tbsp. flour
1 cup milk
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup butter
1 tsp. vanilla
Cook flour and milk until thick, stirring constantly. Let cool until cold. Cream together sugar, butter, vanilla. Add to cold flour mixture. Beat until the consistency to spread. When finished it looks like whipped cream, but until then is curdy.
NOTE: the 2 ozs. of food coloring is the correct amount, and this is the reason for the color and texture of red velvet.
Copied ve
rbatim from a mimeographed sheet handed out by a Home Economics teacher at the University of Idaho in 1961. This story bedeviled the Waldorf-Astoria until the early 1980s, when the expensive-recipe legend shifted to the Mrs. Fields company and eventually to Neiman Marcus as a story about a cookie recipe. In some versions of the legend the woman’s lawyer charges her an outrageous fee for his advice, thus adding insult to injury. Prototypes for the legend in the 1930s and ’40s featured recipes for various kinds of candy, fudge, ice cream, and cake supposedly sold for an outlandishly high price. The earliest published high-priced cake recipe found so far was for “$25 Fudge Cake” as made by a railroad chef and included in a Boston women’s-club cookbook in 1948. Although red cakes have been known to American cooks since the early twentieth century, a ripoff-priced red cake recipe is not found in legends until the 1950s, about the same time that the story attached itself to the Waldorf-Astoria. Even while disavowing the legend, the hotel has given out copies of the “authentic” recipe at no cost. Often served at Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or the Fourth of July by those who enjoy it, Red Velvet Cake represents a strictly “fun food” aspect of American cuisine, similar in that respect to creations like “Mock Apple Pie” (made with Ritz crackers) and “Tomato Soup Cake.”
“Neiman Marcus Cookies”
THIS IS TRUE—PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ IT AND PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERY SINGLE PERSON YOU KNOW WHO HAS AN E-MAIL ADDRESS….. THIS IS REALLY TERRIFIC.
My daughter & I had just finished a salad at Neiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas & decided to have a small dessert. Because both of us are such cookie lovers, we decided to try the “Neiman-Marcus Cookie.”
It was so excellent that I asked if they would give me the recipe and the waitress said with a small frown, “I’m afraid not.” Well, I said, would you let me buy the recipe? With a cute smile, she said “Yes.” I asked how much, and she responded, “only two fifty, it’s a great deal!” I said with approval, just add it to my tab.
Thirty days later, I received my VISA statement from Neiman-Marcus and it was $285.00. I looked again and I remembered I had only spent $9.95 for two salads and about $20.00 for a scarf. As I glanced at the bottom of the statement, it said, “Cookie Recipe - $250.00.”
That’s outrageous!
I called Neiman’s Accounting Dept. and told them the waitress said “two-fifty,” which clearly does not mean “two hundred and fifty dollars” by any *POSSIBLE* interpretation of the phrase. Neiman-Marcus refused to budge. They would not refund my money, because according to them, “What the waitress told you is not our problem. You have already seen the recipe - we absolutely will not refund your money at this point.”
I said, “Okay, you folks got my $250, and now I’m going to have $250.00 worth of fun.” I told her tht I was going to see to it that every cookie lover in the United States with an e-mail account has a $250.00 cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus…for free. She replied, “I wish you wouldn’t do this.” I said, “Well, you should have thought of that before.”
So, here it is!!!
Please, please, please pass it on to everyone you can possibly think of. I paid $250 dollars for this recipe…
“Neiman-Marcus Cookie”
(Recipe may be halved)
2 cups butter
4 cups flour
2 tsp. soda (club soda)
2 cups sugar
5 cups blended oatmeal**
24 oz. chocolate chips
3 cups chopped nuts (your choice)
2 cups brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 8 oz Hershey Bar (grated)
4 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp. vanilla
Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla, mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey Bar and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies.
Have fun!!! This is *not* a joke - - - this is a true story!
Verbatim from the Internet, one of literally hundreds of copies of this that I have received since 1989. In the early 1980s the story was told about the Mrs. Fields company with the typical detail that the “two-fifty” misunderstanding took place during a telephoned request for the recipe made to the company headquarters in Park City, Utah. The blenderized oatmeal and Hershey bar are direct quotations from the Mrs. Fields version, which mutated briefly to “Marshall Fields,” the Chicago department store, before settling on Neiman Marcus and the chain-letter format. Numerous Internet newsgroups and mailing lists have circulated these recipes, with participants gravely discussing such weighty matters as possible copyright restrictions, whether one could not simply cancel the credit card charge, and how best to grate the chocolate bar. Nobody, as far as I know, has commented on the minimal effect of one candy bar spread among 112 cookies, nor the confusion of club soda and baking soda in some versions. Frankly, I have not tested the recipes, and there may be some logic to these ingredients. Mrs. Fields fought the legend with a disclaimer that was printed on cookie bags and on a poster displayed in her outlets. Neiman Marcus debunked the story on the store’s Web page and offered a cookie recipe there for free. As an update of “Red Velvet Cake,” the expensive-recipe legend may be said to have had a life of about fifty years—so far.
In July 1998 a parody of “Neiman Marcus Cookies” reached me via the Internet. In this version a man has his car’s oil changed at the “Neiman Marcus All Tune and Lube” and asks the mechanic if he can have the chemical formula for their best oil. The rest of the story follows the cookie plot closely, and the man ends up paying $250 for the “recipe.” The parody ends by quoting the complex chemical formula for a hydrocarbon compound (which may be motor oil, for all I know). Yet another Neiman Marcus parody is included in the epilogue to this book.
“Find the Hat”
I work in Chicago for McKinsey and Company, an international management consulting firm; two weeks ago I heard this story from a colleague during a discussion on the difficulty of wearing hats in the “windy city.”
Back in the days when McKinsey consultants had to wear hats, one of the consultants was walking down a street in Chicago when the wind picked his hat off his head and blew it down the street. Since the consultant was rushing to a client meeting, he did not have time to chase it. The next time the consultant filed an expense report with Accounting, he listed this lost hat as a business expense and claimed a reimbursement.
About a week later, he received back the expense report with a note attached which said he could not claim a reimbursement for personal items such as a hat. He immediately called Accounting, and there followed a rather vociferous conversation regarding whether his hat was lost in the line of duty. As is true with most discussions with Accounting, they prevailed and he did not get the claim.
About a month later, the consultant filed his next expense report. It was perfectly documented with hotel and restaurant receipts for all the previous month’s travel. But he attached to the report a note to Accounting: “Here’s my expense report. Find the hat.”
I first heard this story in 1984 when I worked for Morgan Guaranty Trust Company in New York. The only differences were that it was a Morgan banker’s hat which was blown off while he was on a sales call in Chicago, and that the Morgan version placed the story in the recent past.
Sent to me in 1988 by James E. Hyman, who commented, “These stories seem to represent the business sub-species of urban legends used to socialize business people to the ever-present game of pulling the wool over the bean-counter’s eyes.” After I published a summary of Hyman’s story I heard from five more businesspeople. A man in Columbus, Ohio, had heard the story told in New York in 1942 concerning a Bell Laboratories employee whose hat was cut in two by a streetcar. A man in Huntington, New York, had heard the story from his “trusted Sales Manager” who said it was a lost umbrella belonging to another salesman that had been buried in the expense account.
A woman in Annandale, Virginia, knew a version in which a Unisys employee in Flemington, New Jersey, had tried to claim the cost of a raincoat he had to buy during a business trip to Seattle; she also phrased the story’s lesson as, “If you have questionable expenses, pad the legitimate expenses.” A man from Danbury, Connecticut, also knew a coat version of the story, which he had heard his father tell in the 1930s. Finally, a man from Wilmette, Illinois, wrote in 1995 to say that during an ad agency lunch a few years before he had been told the “Find the Hat” story by someone who claimed personal acquaintance with the instigator of the padded claim. This correspondent asked, “Is he the truth behind the myth, or just a man of mythic achievement?” I guessed the latter, and did not try to contact his source. Surely this is just a legend whose moral lives on.
“The Wife on the Flight”
Remember that campaign a long time ago when businessmen were first beginning to use airplanes?”
Deseret News
“You mean the one where the airplane company allowed a man’s wife to accompany him free, just to prove there was no danger in airplane travel?”
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 26
