Commenter Of The Day: Dear John Edition
One of the forgotten examples of early post-colonial British-American sitcom imperialism was the show Dear John, which came over to America as Dear John. The premise is simple and similar to the English version, involving a high school teacher who loses everything in his divorce to his wife and is forced to move into an apartment and joins a self-help group of entertaining lonely divorcees. It wasn't a hit but got a full four seasons (back when even bad television got four seasons). Television producers didn't give up on the idea and since then we've had many popular British crossovers, including the wildly successful The Office. Today we told you about a BMW owner who wouldn't give up on his dream of BMW ownership no matter how many loans he defaulted on, though PotbellyJoe has another, equally bad, idea.
A guy I used to work with leased a Mustang in 2000. Already a bad idea. To make matters worse he rolled over his debt from his previous lease into it. So before he started he had an extra $150 a month to pay on top of the already stupid high payment (his negotiation skills were basically, do you have it yellow? how much?)
He came out of the ether in 2002 when he realized he was way over miles again and basically out of cash.
So he goes into a car dealer to find a cheap car to spin off the debt, only to find he's now $10,000 upside down. (I've seen worse believe it on not, and got a bank to approve it, and we wonder what they meant by toxic loans)
Since NJ requires loans to carry gap coverage, he gets it in his head he is going to destroy the car.
So he gets a hotel room in NYC at super shady location. Parks the car out front on the street, leaves the car running and the driver's side window down.
They only took his radio. It ran out of fuel and got ticketed for violating some idling ordinance.
So now he has to find a gas station and a fuel container in a shady-ass part of town. And with the ticket is worried any insurance investigator worth his weight would figure out what was going on whenever he finally did get around to wrecking the thing.
So thoroughly peeved he drives home to the Garden State. Once he gets back to the windy back roads of the state a deer jumps in front of him, he clips it and in his attempts to dodge the deer and being hard on the brakes, he goes off the road and hits a tree. The whole passenger side is screwed up, the hood is pushed and every airbag deployed. Totaled.
The deer, having been only clipped, gets up and starts to run away.
It took him a long time to prove that it really was an accident. But there was a clump of fur in the crack between the headlight and the hood.
Needless to say, that bit of fur saved his ass from a heck of a lot of debt, and probably jail time.
Probably the first time in history a man was happy he had hit a deer
That friend, of course, a principle architect of credit default swaps.