The Fine Green Smell of Money

I started work at IMC back in the heady days of increasing internet demand and rapidly rising technology stock futures. Our stock split in every odd year, a fine and profitable cadence. My more seasoned colleagues were cashing in their stock options and paying off their houses or buying big new ones, and putting expensive sports cars in the garage. I didn’t own much yet, but I snatched it up as best I could afford, happy that I was going to be rich. Then in the late 1990s I got stock options myself and calculated that, with present trends, I’d be a millionaire before I was fifty.

I exercised those options last week, on the verge of expiration, ten years to the day since they were granted. The way it works is, you take the grant price and subtract it from the current price, multiply that difference by the hundreds, nay thousands, of options you were granted, and take those vast profits to the bank, whistling as you go, dreaming of Corvettes and Sea Rays. Considering how well the stock market has done over the past ten years, it was no great stretch to take my entire wad and snag me a fancy new set of wheels.


After finding a few dozen half-buried chunks of concrete, the previous model was spreading a quart of oil on each turn around the yard. Finally stopped running with a bang a couple weeks ago and my wife came in with motor oil splattered on her clothes. She was quite exhilarated by the experience and told me about it with great enthusiasm, yet was willing to trade up. The new one has an actual drive motor with several forward speeds. Nearly hauls itself over the moguls and hillocks hidden in the long grass. Best of all, it has an electric starter. I was all for that, because I’m tired of hearing the ol’ lady bitch about the ripcord always throwing her back out.

I’ve already customized it with a cable-tie, stylishly located so as to keep the control cable from dangling into the passing verdure. I’m thinking of adding a cup-holder, though I may have to restrict usage to beverages whose caps can be screwed on tight. But never mind style, I am all about function. How else but with a new lawnmower are we to find more half-buried chunks of concrete? Ah, the fresh green fragrance of capital success.