Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (33 page)

“Neiman Marcus Cookies”

THIS IS TRUE—PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ IT AND PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERY SINGLE PERSON YOU KNOW WHO HAS AN E-MAIL ADDRESS….. THIS IS REALLY TERRIFIC.

My daughter & I had just finished a salad at Neiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas & decided to have a small dessert. Because both of us are such cookie lovers, we decided to try the “Neiman-Marcus Cookie.”

It was so excellent that I asked if they would give me the recipe and the waitress said with a small frown, “I’m afraid not.” Well, I said, would you let me buy the recipe? With a cute smile, she said “Yes.” I asked how much, and she responded, “only two fifty, it’s a great deal!” I said with approval, just add it to my tab.

Thirty days later, I received my VISA statement from Neiman-Marcus and it was $285.00. I looked again and I remembered I had only spent $9.95 for two salads and about $20.00 for a scarf. As I glanced at the bottom of the statement, it said, “Cookie Recipe - $250.00.”

That’s outrageous!

I called Neiman’s Accounting Dept. and told them the waitress said “two-fifty,” which clearly does not mean “two hundred and fifty dollars” by any
^*
POSSIBLE
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interpretation of the phrase. Neiman-Marcus refused to budge. They would not refund my money, because according to them, “What the waitress told you is not our problem. You have already seen the recipe - we absolutely will not refund your money at this point.”

I said, “Okay, you folks got my $250, and now I’m going to have $250.00 worth of fun.” I told her tht I was going to see to it that every cookie lover in the United States with an e-mail account has a $250.00 cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus…for free. She replied, “I wish you wouldn’t do this.” I said, “Well, you should have thought of that before.”

So, here it is!!!

Please, please, please pass it on to everyone you can possibly think of. I paid $250 dollars for this recipe…

Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla, mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey Bar and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies.

Have fun!!! This is
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not
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a joke - - - this is a true story!

Verbatim from the Internet, one of literally hundreds of copies of this that I have received since 1989. In the early 1980s the story was told about the Mrs. Fields company with the typical detail that the “two-fifty” misunderstanding took place during a telephoned request for the recipe made to the company headquarters in Park City, Utah. The blenderized oatmeal and Hershey bar are direct quotations from the Mrs. Fields version, which mutated briefly to “Marshall Fields,” the Chicago department store, before settling on Neiman Marcus and the chain-letter format. Numerous Internet newsgroups and mailing lists have circulated these recipes, with participants gravely discussing such weighty matters as possible copyright restrictions, whether one could not simply cancel the credit card charge, and how best to grate the chocolate bar. Nobody, as far as I know, has commented on the minimal effect of one candy bar spread among 112 cookies, nor the confusion of club soda and baking soda in some versions. Frankly, I have not tested the recipes, and there may be some logic to these ingredients. Mrs. Fields fought the legend with a disclaimer that was printed on cookie bags and on a poster displayed in her outlets. Neiman Marcus debunked the story on the store’s Web page and offered a cookie recipe there for free. As an update of “Red Velvet Cake,” the expensive-recipe legend may be said to have had a life of about fifty years—so far.

In July 1998 a parody of “Neiman Marcus Cookies” reached me via the Internet. In this version a man has his car’s oil changed at the “Neiman Marcus All Tune and Lube” and asks the mechanic if he can have the chemical formula for their best oil. The rest of the story follows the cookie plot closely, and the man ends up paying $250 for the “recipe.” The parody ends by quoting the complex chemical formula for a hydrocarbon compound (which may be motor oil, for all I know). Yet another Neiman Marcus parody is included in the epilogue to this book.

“Find the Hat”

I
work in Chicago for McKinsey and Company, an international management consulting firm; two weeks ago I heard this story from a colleague during a discussion on the difficulty of wearing hats in the “windy city.”

Back in the days when McKinsey consultants had to wear hats, one of the consultants was walking down a street in Chicago when the wind picked his hat off his head and blew it down the street. Since the consultant was rushing to a client meeting, he did not have time to chase it. The next time the consultant filed an expense report with Accounting, he listed this lost hat as a business expense and claimed a reimbursement.

About a week later, he received back the expense report with a note attached which said he could not claim a reimbursement for personal items such as a hat. He immediately called Accounting, and there followed a rather vociferous conversation regarding whether his hat was lost in the line of duty. As is true with most discussions with Accounting, they prevailed and he did not get the claim.

About a month later, the consultant filed his next expense report. It was perfectly documented with hotel and restaurant receipts for all the previous month’s travel. But he attached to the report a note to Accounting: “Here’s my expense report. Find the hat.”

I first heard this story in 1984 when I worked for Morgan Guaranty Trust Company in New York. The only differences were that it was a Morgan banker’s hat which was blown off while he was on a sales call in Chicago, and that the Morgan version placed the story in the recent past.

Sent to me in 1988 by James E. Hyman, who commented, “These stories seem to represent the business sub-species of urban legends used to socialize business people to the ever-present game of pulling the wool over the bean-counter’s eyes.” After I published a summary of Hyman’s story I heard from five more businesspeople. A man in Columbus, Ohio, had heard the story told in New York in 1942 concerning a Bell Laboratories employee whose hat was cut in two by a streetcar. A man in Huntington, New York, had heard the story from his “trusted Sales Manager” who said it was a lost umbrella belonging to another salesman that had been buried in the expense account. A woman in Annandale, Virginia, knew a version in which a Unisys employee in Flemington, New Jersey, had tried to claim the cost of a raincoat he had to buy during a business trip to Seattle; she also phrased the story’s lesson as, “If you have questionable expenses, pad the legitimate expenses.” A man from Danbury, Connecticut, also knew a coat version of the story, which he had heard his father tell in the 1930s. Finally, a man from Wilmette, Illinois, wrote in 1995 to say that during an ad agency lunch a few years before he had been told the “Find the Hat” story by someone who claimed personal acquaintance with the instigator of the padded claim. This correspondent asked, “Is he the truth behind the myth, or just a man of mythic achievement?” I guessed the latter, and did not try to contact his source. Surely this is just a legend whose moral lives on.

“The Wife on the Flight”

R
emember that campaign a long time ago when businessmen were first beginning to use airplanes?”

Deseret News

“You mean the one where the airplane company allowed a man’s wife to accompany him free, just to prove there was no danger in airplane travel?”

“Yes, that’s the one! Did you ever hear the payoff on that?”

Everyone was interested.

“Well, it seems the company kept a record of the names of the wives who made the trip. And about six months later they wrote to all of them asking how they had enjoyed their airplane trip. And ninety per cent of the letters came back with the question, ‘What airplane trip?’”

From Marguerite Lyon,
And So to Bedlam (1943),
pp. 280–81. This story has been published several times in sources ranging from newspaper columns to books concerning business practices, airlines, and even extramarital affairs. Variations on the theme include a story in which a hotel chain sent follow-up letters to the spouses of travelers who had never actually stayed there, and a story in which a university sent inquiries to married people who had stopped attending evening classes. For straying spouses, the moral of the stories is “Maintain your cover story.” For businesses, the moral might be “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“Redemption Rumors”

S
pokane—An old rumor and a cruel hoax has just taken a new turn, Mrs. Marie M. Ferrell, manager of Better Business Bureau of Spokane said Tuesday.

“Thousands of people have been duped into saving useless items in the futile hope of supplying a seeing-eye dog to a blind person,” she said.

First, she said, it was empty match folders, then cellophane strips from cigarette packages.

“More recently it has been tabs off tea bags and empty cigarette packages,” she said. “Now there is a false report going the rounds which started people saving beer can tabs.”

These rumors persist, she said, despite the fact that seeing-eye dogs cannot be obtained through collection of any type of items.

F
alse rumors have plagued the aluminum industry and the national Kidney Foundation for years concerning beverage can pull tabs and kidney dialysis. Across the nation, at various times, word has spread that aluminum can pull tabs could be recycled in exchange for time on a kidney dialysis machine for someone with kidney disease. Many well-intentioned yet misinformed groups and indivuals collected pull tabs only to find that there was no pull tab/kidney dialysis donation program. It never existed. Anywhere.

PULL-TOP PRICE RUMORS DON’T HAVE A RING OF TRUTH

Fort Worth—A gallon jug full of pull tops from aluminum cans is worth:

A) $90 cash?

B) A pint of blood at a blood bank?

C) Free time on a kidney dialysis machine?

D) 46 cents, the going rate at local recycling centers for roughly 2 pounds of aluminum?

The correct answer, of course, is 46 cents.

As odd as the other answers sound, however, dozens of people a day have been calling Texas recycling centers in recent months, saying that they have heard that the pull tops are somehow valuable or special.

“I’ve gotten calls from all kinds of people who have heard these rumors: kids, schoolteachers, individuals old and young alike,” said Susan Dequeant, marketing specialist for Alcoa Recycling Co. in Grand Prairie.

Dequeant said the most common variation of the rumor is that the pull tops are a purer type of aluminum and that a gallon jug filled with them is worth between $80 and $100.

She said the rumor that one can receive medical services for the pull tops might be related to rumors that the tops are made into hypodermic needles. Neither is true….

T
een’s Effort Hits Sour Note

Fort Walton Beach [Florida]—Kerra Hensley was on the verge of tears.

“It’s gotta be true,” the 14-year-old said.

Thursday afternoon, she learned a month’s worth of work would not end as she hoped.

Her goal was to help her 5-year-old neighbor, a blond, blue-eyed little girl who loves to jump on trampolines. The child needs kidney dialysis to stay alive.

Kerra collected 50,000 soda can tabs to exchange for 50,000 free minutes of kidney dialysis at a Gainesville hospital.

But the Daily News, while pursuing a story about Kerra’s good deed, discovered no such program was available.