I mentioned earlier that I got together with some friends in New York over the weekend. At one point we started telling some stories about 9/11 and one of the friends (another non-New Yorker) retold hers (one of my favorites): She was at work when it happened, and after a few hours, like most companies, her employer shut down and sent everyone home. One of her colleagues was frantically trying to get word about her uncle — he was employed by a company in one of the towers. My friend stayed behind and tried to help her colleague get through to someone, anyone...but obviously, it was impossible. This colleague told my friend and others trying to help to go on home and reluctantly, my friend left her worried friend behind.
On a train home, my friend was squashed up against some woman yapping on her cell phone to someone...no one on the train could avoid hearing this idiot complaining that she had investments with Lehman Brothers, that she couldn’t get anyone from Lehman on the phone, and what was going to happen to her money? When this stupid woman was done, my friend (never one to mince words) told her in no uncertain terms what a selfish POS she was. There were people worried about loved ones and this woman was more worried about her money. The stupid broad eventually got off at her stop well before my friend, whereupon others on the train burst into applause.
Your story of the selfish investor witch reminds me of a particular poster at the non-political Internet board where I used to post quite heavily.
While planes remained grounded in the days after, this well-known board loon had the temerity to whine about spending days stranded in Hawaii, keeping her from returning to CA or KT, wherever it was she called home. Of course she got “shouted down” even more than usual.
In a different thread she started, she crabbed about how the US economy was doomed and, in what passed for her wisdom, advised everyone to cash in everything and stuff our mattresses with the money. While normally I stayed out of the wackiness, I told her she should stock up on ketchup to make those American dollars taste better as she huddled in her trailer with the lights off and black helicopters flying hither and yon looking for the space aliens living under her outhouse. In better days she’d been a source of amusement, but ...
Gawd, we all of us wanted to reach across the keyboard and throttle the addled wench into blessed silence.