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were coming in. If it wasn't one thing it was another. There'd be some incident on the lot or the roof starting to leak or a death in the family. When he got depressed he sat around drinking and muttering for a spell. Ginny didn't notice such things. She was always bright and cheerful, seeing the world in rosy colors. Nothing upset her and nothing surprised her, or if something did it was hidden behind her languorous locutions. Charlie was more vocal though he seldom raised his voice. More often than not life confused him. He couldn't understand why he wasn't getting ahead or why the years were passing by so quickly with so little to show for them except a bald spot in the middle of his hair and a little paunch and the creaky joints. If something didn't happen soon it wasn't going to happen at all, he knew. After all the entry forms had been received by midnight of the appointed day a panel of three judges began to read them. They were to be judged most of all 
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by sincerity. Spelling didn't count. However, as most of the entry forms were identically phrased, or pretty near so, and in any case the judges couldn't possibly read the millions of entry forms pouring in every day, even with an army of assistants to help them out, it was deemed advisable to devise a system of random selection. The system was approved by the President himself and put into law by Congress. The system devised was to blindfold one of the judges and have him or her wade into the ocean of entry forms that were being stored in the Los Angeles Coliseum and pick one out. A certified public accountant was on hand to make sure there wasn't any monkey business. In this way everyone had an equal chance. The winning entry was kept in a vault until the announcement of the results. Joe showed up at the plant at 7 a.m and started on the toilets on the factory floor. Some of them got stopped up good and proper, not like the executive toilets upstairs. He  |
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