She called to let me know that there may be a problem on Friday. She said she was still working on it but wanted to know how much extra cash I had on hand. Cash on hand lately hasn't been in large quantities. I asked what the problem was but she wouldn't tell me. I asked how much she needed but she wouldn't tell me that either so I told her the amount of cash I could part with by Friday. She said she would let me know later if she would need it or not.

Yesterday, she called to let me know that there would indeed be a problem of Friday and she would need twenty one hundred dollars and she told me why. The 'why' turned out to be something very important. The amount of cash I told her I could part with was four hundred; a mortgage, a car payment, car insurance and a credit card bill all come due near the first of the month and money from the second job has been slow to nonexistent, so the end of the month usually leaves me cash poor.

In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid there is a scene where the two of them are in Mexico looking for a job guarding the payroll and the guy doing the interview wants to know how good with a gun Sundance is, so the guy tosses a coin a few yards away and asks Sundance to shoot it. Sundance then asks "Can I move?" and the guy with a perturbed attitude says "No!” Sundance draws his weapon and standing straight aims at the coin and misses. I forget what the guy then said but he conveyed a message that Sundance can't hit the side of a barn which causes Sundance to shoot at the coin again only this time he 'moves' and shoots the coin a couple times.

The point of that movie recap is if the guy didn't put unnecessary limits on Sundance, Sundance would have been able to show the guy what he wanted to see. And the reason I bring that up is because even though sometimes I'm cash poor doesn't mean I cannot obtain cash.

After I hung up the phone, I walked down to my credit union and requested a loan and twelve minutes later had a check in hand for two thousand dollars, and it only took that long because the lady helping me had made a mistake so she had to do the whole process over again.

A cool thing about getting a loan from the credit union is that they take the money right from your paycheck, you can make as many extra payments as you wish but the minimum payment automatically gets deducted which in this case is nine dollars a week.

I'll get the money back but even if I don't, I'm not going to miss nine dollars a week.

When I called her back twenty minutes later and told her I was holding a check for two grand she started crying. She cried for a couple minutes and I couldn't understand most of what she was saying which only made me more uncomfortable.

If she had just told me what she had needed we could have saved some drama.

nine bucks:

what I probably toss into tip jars a week - like at Dunkin Donuts
sometimes, what I pass out to the homeless in a week
often, give to the street performers a month
occasionally, what I spend on coffee drinks a day*
frequently spend three times that on lunch a day
Most often, more than three times less than my average solo bar tab.


*Grande White Chocolate Mochas don't grow on trees, they are quite nice iced.


...

I'm a popular guy and folks will ask me how I'm doing all the time. My pat answer: pretty good. And sometimes I'll get the response: "Just pretty good," which usually gets the reply "Better than not so good."

Pretty good to me, although grammatically incorrect in answering that question, is better than good. Pretty damn good is better than very good. Pretty good to me is just moderately less than pretty damn good. But I can see how some folks hear 'pretty good' as 'mostly good' which is just shy of plain old good.