The letter came in the mail in an unassuming presentation. Almost as though the plain, white envelope contained little more than advertising. But it didn’t. Inside were riches unimaginable.
It was a notice from a law firm acting on behalf of the shareholders of a large company trading on the stock market which had run afoul of regulations. There had been a class-action suit filed and a settlement was finally arrived at.
That settlement was $69 million. I will write it out as it seems more impressive done that way. Sixty-nine million dollars.
The law firm was searching for people who owned shares of this company between 2004 and 2009. As it happens, my wife and I did own shares in that company during that period which is why we got the letter. In fact, we owned a lot of shares, 1,091 of them. That is a very large number to me. I do not own 1,091 of anything, not even screwnails though I do have three peanut butter jars full of them.
I am not a stock market expert, not even close, but I cannot imagine anyone else owning even a fraction of the shares in this company that we did. We owned, after all, 1,091 of them. I am also not a mathematician but I have a good feeling with our majority stake in this company back then, we can probably expect a cool thirty or forty million coming our way. We will know for sure in 60 days.
I was at the coffee shop when I opened the envelope and I called my wife from the Cadillac dealership which is located between the restaurant and our home. I told her the good news and wondered what colour of new Caddy she would prefer. She didn’t have an opinion on that but instead, advised me to come right home so we could talk about this new development in our lives. I might be mistaken but I think I remember her using the same tone of voice when she was trying to talk our kids into climbing down carefully from the highest branches of the maple tree in our yard.
So I told the dealer “the red one” and then rushed straight home to celebrate our sudden good fortune with my spouse. She is not usually a spoilsport, but on this occasion, she put forward the idea that we might not see even $20 million of the settlement funds, let alone 40. I was disappointed by her pessimism but pretended to be reasonable. She took the position that there might have been a few investors who owned more than 1,091 shares in the company between 2004 and 2009, as doubtful a possibility as could be.
In fact, she guessed that some people might have actually owned many times more than 1,091 shares, a position I found totally unimaginable. I still maintain that 1,091 is a big number, whether we’re talking screwnails, stars or stocks. And I realized the more she talked the poorer we were becoming so I dropped the subject.
Then I set to work filling out the required forms to ensure we qualified for our cut of the settlement, or our eff ewe money, as I like to call it when my wife is not around.
It took me a month to fill out those stupid forms. And during that period, I discovered something funny. I swore out loud more than 1,091 times during that month and the strange thing is, it hardly seemed like I was swearing at all. All I know is there were long stretches during that process when the dog and cats went missing.
Today was the last day to send in our application. I spent the whole day finishing it up, swearing and rushing it to the post office before the deadline.
I have never known my wife to be wrong on many occasions but boy is she in for a surprise two months from now.
Either that or I will be calling the class-action lawyers and yelling, “Eff ewe!” into the phone.
I will report on the lawyers’ decision in eight weeks’ time but don’t expect me to wave at you from my red Caddy. I will have moved up a class or two by then.
©2017 Jim Hagarty
(Update 2023: I am writing this update from my phone while sitting in our 2006 Chrysler Sebring, coloured silver like our knives and forks. I honestly do not remember what the outcome of all this was but I do recall crying more than 1,091 tears when the decisions were announced so that might be a clue. I have a feeling our documentation was not complete enough or something like that and we couldn’t remedy the defects. The day our claim was rejected, my wife spent the afternoon talking me down from the top of our maple tree.)
