Scoop! of Foreign Currency

The Alameda Daily Noose and I scooped all of the other major news media when we discovered, much to our surprise, that we have won a large sum of money in the British Lottery. We must have accidentally gotten the wrong kind of ticket last time we were trying for the big SuperLOTTO Plus® (not "Super Lotto Plus," as the "Alameda" Fly-Swatter once erroneously called it) jackpot.

The announcement of our win arrived by gee-mail, and not a moment too soon. The Roger Grumbel Home for Clean, Well-Behaved, Deserving Orphans from Alameda is having trouble coming up with sufficient funds for gruel while we wait for that generous Mr. Stevenson to get his donation to us. We already sent him our bank account number so that he could extract a wiring fee from it and transfer the money from his bank in Dubai, but there seems to have been a little hold-up in the processing of that transfer. To make matters worse, our bank seems to be having some kind of computer problem that is causing our balance to show up as "$0.00," which simply can't be right.

While we wait for this hiccup to be straightened out, we're having to rely on the revenue I raised by breaking open the Alameda Daily Noose's pink piggy bank. "There, there," I said, "I'll pay you back as soon as we get that big payout from the lottery, although I do hope it will be in dollars instead of shillings and pence. As soon as we provide that nice gent at the British Lottery with our bank account number, we'll have more than enough to tide us over until Mr. Stevenson finally wires us that money for the orphanage."

Upon hearing my tender words of encouragement, the Alameda Daily Noose—fighting the tears—looked up and smiled bravely back at me.