Would You Like to Buy a Tadpole?

Written Monday, July 06, 2009

It was just after 8pm and I had just sat down at the table in the camper with my laptop to do a little blogging. My fingers were tapping away on the keyboard when I heard a small (knock knock knock) on the door. I assumed it was blind Tommy from the pop-up across the street coming over to shoot the shit poo-poo for a while. I opened up the camper door, looked forward and saw nothing so I looked down. There stood a little boy about four to six years of age holding a bucket half full of water with some HUGE tadpole’s swimming around. We have some HUGE bullfrogs here at the resort so the tadpole’s you find around the banks of the lake are HUGE as well. He looked up at me and shyly asked “would you like to buy some tadpoles for fishing”? I smiled at him and thought now here is an enterprising little boy! He is certainly at the right place to be a door to door bait salesman. We ALL need bait and you can’t beat service like THIS! “How much you asking for them” I asked. “Five dollars” he responded. I looked into the bucket and counted eight tadpoles. I did that math in my head real quick and said “gee, that’s almost 63 cents a piece for all eight of them”. He took his eyes off the tadpoles swimming around in the bucket, looked up at me and said “no, it’s five dollars for one of them”. The expression on his face and what he had just told me made me want to laugh hysterically. Now I know it’s very convenient to open up your door and buy your bait fresh out of the lake but I still thought that five dollars was a little high for one tadpole. Not wanting to let the enterprising young man leave my camper without a sale, I asked if he would take fifty cents for one. He looked back into his bucket and thought long and hard about the offer that was just laid on the table before him. He looked back up at me and said “nope, five dollars”. I chuckled a bit and sadly told the boy I was not interested and thanked him for dropping by and offering me some bait. I let him know that my fifty cent offer was still good and that if he changed his mind, he could come back and make a sale. I watched him walk off totally unscathed by not making a sale. He never did come back which makes me wonder if he….

1. Found enough people that gave in to his boyish charm and he sold all of his tadpoles and made $40

Or

1. Got tired of the rejection and went into the lemonade business.

If I ever find out that answer is A, you can bet that my youngest son and I will be going into the door to door bait selling business. I will catch them and Logan can sell them. LOL