The Hand Job

by Rip Peterson

Table of Contents

My Wife Discovers My Secret

I am going to start this off with an apology. You might expect this to be some big action story where I save the world. You will be disappointed going into this thinking that. I promise. There isn’t much action in the story. Though I may regale you with the time an animal, which may have been a woodchuck or a groundhog, was trying to burrow under my garage. I grabbed the downspout hanging from the garage and started chasing it.

I got tired and gave up after twenty feet.

But the woodchuck or groundhog or whatever it was never came back so Mission Accomplished.

This also isn’t a feel-good success story.

There was never a point in my life that I had so much money that I didn’t know what to do with. No big promotions. No strippers with a heart of gold.

Nothing like that.

No major successes in my life.

No fall from grace.

Which I guess I should have expected.

When I was nineteen, and just to let you know I took the year after graduating high school off, I ended up enrolling in classes at the local community college. I ended up dropping out of a class because it interfered with watching the soap opera Passions. I don’t remember which class I dropped but I do remember that Timmy was still a part of the show at the time.