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There's a story going around about a lawyer who bought a box of rare and
expensive cigars and insured them against, among other things, fire. It
doesn't take a terribly creative mind to come up with such a loony notion.
It would take some real innovative sleight of hand, however, to pull it off.
As you've probably already guessed or read, the lawyer is supposed to have smoked the cigars and
claimed their loss "in a series of small fires." When his insurance company
refused to pay, he sued, and so the story goes, won to the tune of $15,000.
Now run that through your reality filter.
No, I don't believe it either. I've searched the Internet for the source of
this story, which is purported to have won first place in a "recent"
Criminal Lawyers Award Contest. Searching for the contest leads to a legal
service. Could the whole thing be a promotion? Who knows?
I also found evidence that the story is, in fact, an urban legend. Seems the
Internet version of the story goes back to a 1996 entry on
alt.smokers.cigars, which comes from a word-of-mouth yarn circulating since
the 60s, which may have come from the an old joke: "He's the kind of
accountant you've got to admire. Last year he deducted eighty cartons of
cigarettes from my income tax. Called it loss by fire!" All of the above
belong to a kind of fiction called
Cakes and Ales.
Don't feel bad if you fell for this or any other urban legend. We all
believe what we want to believe—from silly
superstitions to the promises of politicians. Like all irrational beliefs, rotten-lawyer stories
simply support our
stereotypes. In this case, it's our anti-lawyer prejudice and suspicion of authority.
Creative thinkers need finely tuned reality filters, but if it weren't for our ability to suspend skepticism, we'd have no use for
literature, love songs, movies, and jokes. A good story, no matter how
fantastic, works only if it resonates with our own experience and strikes a
chord of believability.
On the other side of the coin, lack of
skepticism does us all a disservice.
Not just because, in this case, honest lawyers might be abused, but because
truth can be so much more interesting. For example, in my search for the
source of the cigar-arson story, I found no end of other innovative and amusing urban
legends, just as funny, some even more ridiculous, but all enlightening.
I guess we just have to learn when to question and when to enjoy an honest
invention.
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