Community ClicksGood fortune, misfortune
I took my teenage daughter and one of her friends, whose father died last year, to my employer’s annual outing, a Mets game and raffle.
The grand prize was a 47-inch TV.
Coincidentally, the friend mentioned that her family needed a new TV.
As fate had it, she held the winning ticket.
She was thrilled.
After the game, we took her and the TV to her house.
Her mother was delighted but soon phoned to say that since I paid for the tickets, the TV is mine.
Is it?
— Stuart Ilkowitz, Livingston, N.J.
The TV belongs to your daughter’s friend.
When you gave her that ticket, you gave her all attendant benefits, including those that are 47-inches wide (measured diagonally).
Her claim has nothing to do with her family’s need for a new TV — there was no means test — or with the death of her father: The jumbo TV wasn’t bestowed as solace for the grief-stricken.
It is simply a random bit of good fortune for the person holding the winning ticket: her.
Had the raffle organizers wanted to award prizes not to the ticket holder but to the ticket buyer, they could have drawn credit-card slips out of a gigantic Mets cap.
The decision would have been trickier if you had physically held on to all the tickets and ushered your crew into the block of seats you had bought.
Then you could argue that the prize goes to the ticket holder — you — as distinct from the seat holder, the friend.
But happily (for her, if not you) the seat holder and the ticket holder coincided.
This unsettling situation need never recur.
Now that she has a TV that massive, the friend will never again forsake the comfort of her living room for a distant, drafty ballpark to watch the Mets play baseball, if that is what they are doing. It is hard to be sure.
Update: The families compromised: Ilkowitz kept the enormous 47-inch TV and bought the daughter’s friend a merely very big 32-inch LCD TV for about half the cost of its colossal sibling.
Loan mugging?
I agreed to lend money to a friend and withdrew it from the bank in cash.
While I was on the way to deliver it to him, I was mugged, and the money was stolen.
I would not normally carry around this much money, certainly not in cash.
My friend was sympathetic but left it there, with no offers of sorting out the situation or assisting me in any way.
What should I do?
— Name Withheld, Manila
You should endure your loss with stoicism.
It’s admirable that you were willing to help a friend and lamentable that you were robbed, but it doesn’t follow that your friend must make up any of the stolen money.
Had you been robbed while you were on the way to pay for your new mink muff, you would not expect your furrier to hand you some compensatory cash. Why should your friend behave differently?
You never actually gave your friend any money, albeit because of sad happenstance, so there’s nothing for him to repay.
You have entered “for want of a nail” territory, and that way lies madness.
Trace any chain of events back far enough, and it’s all somebody else’s fault.
Why not send the bill to your impecunious friend’s parents?
If they had never met, fallen in love and wed, he wouldn’t have been born, descended into hard times and needed a loan.
Or his grandparents, or .?.?. well, I think you see where this is going: someplace where sarcasm reigns and every misfortune can be blamed on that darn fish who left the sea to walk on dry land and evolve into the woman who broke my heart.
I curse that fish.
Of course, if the robbery left you too hard-pressed to lend any money to your friend, so be it.
Then everybody loses. Except the mugger.
You might take comfort in the sardonic maxim “No good deed goes unpunished” (or, incidentally, in the case of celebrity charity work, “unpublished”).
