picked

After finding out that a locksmith charged Sean a butt-ton of money to open the door to his apartment, B was thinking that maybe we should get into that line of work. I was thinking it probably isn’t as lucrative a business as she thinks it is. I mean, there’s probably reasons like insurance and overhead for charging that much. I doubt all that money goes into their pockets. But B was thinking that we could do it better than any other locksmiths in the area, to corner the market. “Say we promise fresh-baked cookies when we come pick your locks,” she said. “Call our business, Picked With Love.” I suppose that might work.

It’s just one of our many hare-brained schemes to make a cool million and retire before we’re too old to enjoy retirement. Our last scheme was a plan to open a burger joint somewhere in northern Japan. When I was stationed in Misawa, we found out that the Japanese just love any food that they think of as American. Once a year, the base opens its gates to the Japanese so they can come see all the jets, and the various organizations on base fill their coffers with money raised by selling hamburgers and hot dogs, all cooked over giant gas grills cranked up as high as they’ll go so they can throw them on, turn them over once, then take them off and throw another batch on. They burned the burgers to a greasy crisp that wouldn’t have been considered edible, even at the county fair, but the Japanese threw money at them for the privilege of eating genuine American hamburgers. So B and I were thinking that we should be able to make a living selling burgers, just burgers, at a classic greasy spoon of a diner. So long as they can see us burning the burgers to a crisp at a grill right before there eyes, the magic should be there, right?

Well, it’s only an idea, thank goodness. Smarter people that B and I are in charge of the money we’re going to live off in our old age, or at least I hope so. If we were in charge of our own retirement funds, we’d be greeting people at the local Wal Mart well into our 80s.