From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 18:03:28 MDT
Mike writes
> > This is getting absurd. The odds of you meeting an acquaintance
> > in a restaurant in Paris are ridiculously small.
>
> Yet not out of the range of possibility. Nor, it seems are you taking
> into account the 'six degrees of separation' phenomenon. Let me tell
> you a few stories:
Nice stories suppressed. I can tell some of my own, actually.
> The moral is that most people really do not appreciate how few links
> there are between us and anybody else on the planet. THIS is why
> tipping and other such behaviors work so well as social lubricant and
> stimulant.
Okay, then trying to follow the logic here, since from 1966 through 1977
I was an extremely cheap tipper---when I tipped at all---then it follows
that I lost tremendous respect worldwide as rumors, stories, exaggerations,
anecdotes, circulated widely, laying low my reputation. Think of the
tragic loss of income and prestige I somehow endured as my reputation
all through North America and Europe withered during those lean years.
Although by 1977 I was an international pariah, fortunately my change
in 1980 mostly influenced by my rising income surely must have
rehabilitated my image since then. Perhaps I should send out millions
of emails (the way the spammers do), and post to all the newsgroups
and on-line chat discussions that I've reformed; for surely, among
the world's many millions, vast multitudes still recall what a cheapskate
I was, and I suppose that my reputation will never fully recover.
Lee
(P.S. The above was written quite sarcastically to illustrate the
how farfetched some peoples theories (not necessarily Mike's) have
gotten.)
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