2497. The secret of success

I have been going through old photos of myself wondering which one they will use if the town ever decides to erect a statue in my honour.

The sudden exploration into such a thing was prompted by a letter I received in the mail just this morning saying that the Town Council had named me “Citizen of the Decade”. This is the third consecutive year I have received such an honour. Such an award results from anonymous nominations. Which reminds me: I must pay Ms. Dolores Smythe – she’s a brilliant writer of resumes and this is the third year I’ve successfully used her.

One wonders when all this fuss is going to end. They have already named the city’s Sports’ Complex after me, and also the Municipal Swimming Baths. Sometimes I think they do things like that because they think I might make a donation or something. I might be the town’s only billionaire but that doesn’t prompt me in the slightest to give as much as a penny. I did pay to have some trees cut back, and that’s about all. They were obscuring the name sign of the Municipal Swimming Pool.  In fact I overheard a girl say to her mother as they entered for a swim that “I like this swimming pool”. Doesn’t she know the pool has a name? Education these days has gone down the gurgler.

Speaking of which… I had been invited to speak to the students at the local high school as to what makes for a successful career. I told them, I said, this was the exact question that destined people for failure. If you tell people how you go about making money the first thing they do is try to make money themselves using the same method. I learned this the hard way. I once told a guy that I added an extra dollar to every sale made at the Salvation Army second hand store where I worked when I started out. I soon made a pretty penny and moved on, but I heard later that he got taken to court for pilfering money from the Sallies. If I still worked there I would have been undercut.

Anyway to get back to this statue…  I’ve phoned the Mayor. She said she’ll do what she can and I said if she succeeds I’ll double the amount. She seemed quite keen.

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