A story worth sharing from last night...

I don't doubt its veracity. The person who told this story is an attorney and soon-to-be member of a non-profit board that I am on. He told us that he is a first generation immigrant and his father came to this country from Peru in the early 1960s. He was trained as a surgeon and found a job in the Detroit area where he practiced his profession. After getting settled into a place to live near his work (the hospital),  he felt it necessary to have a car. This is a natural reaction, especially back then, since Detroit was the Motor City and banging out some pretty good products back-in-the-day.

After performing surgery all day, he wasn't much concerned about the way he looked after-work and would wear simple clothes - jeans, t-shirt etc. on his walk home. In between the hospital and where he was living, there was a Ford dealership. He walked in and, in broken English, he said that he would like to buy a Thunderbird. That happened to be the most expensive car in Ford's line-up. The sales person was more than a little incredulous about whether this disheveled foreigner had the resources to buy such an expensive car. So the sales guy said, "Why don't you come back with a month's worth of pay stubs and we will put that as a down payment on one for you."

So, the gentleman left, continued his surgery work at the hospital, and he collected his pay stubs over the next four weeks.

A month later, he walks back into the dealership and his month's worth of pay stubs was more than the price of a Thunderbird. The dealership balked at honoring their pledge, having been caught judging a book by its cover. The doctor got an attorney and soon he drove out of the dealership with a free Thunderbird. He couldn't take it back to the dealership to have it serviced - they refused to do it. So, he had to take it elsewhere for mechanical work.