CigArson
By Peter LloydThere's a story going around about a lawyer who bought a box of rare and expensive cigars and insured them against fire. It doesn't take a terribly creative mind to come up with such a loony notion. It would take some real innovative sleight of hand, however, to pull it off.
As you've probably already guessed or read, the lawyer is supposed to have smoked the cigars and claimed their loss "in a series of small fires." When his insurance company refused to pay, he sued, and so the story goes, won to the tune of $15,000. Now run that through your reality filter.
No, I don't believe it either. I've searched the Internet for the source of this story, which is purported to have won first place in a Criminal Lawyers Award Contest. Searching for the contest leads to a legal service. Could the whole thing be a promotion? Who knows?
I also found evidence that the story is, in fact, an urban legend. Seems the Internet version of the story goes back to a 1996 entry on alt.smokers.cigars, which comes from a word-of-mouth yarn circulating since the 60s, which may have come from the an old joke: "He's the kind of accountant you've got to admire. Last year he deducted eighty cartons of cigarettes from my income tax. Called it loss by fire!" All of the above belong to a kind of fiction called Cakes and Ales.
Don't feel bad if you fell for this or any other urban legend. We all believe what we want to believe--from silly superstitions to the promises of politicians. Like all irrational beliefs, rotten-lawyer stories simply support our stereotypes. In this case, our anti-lawyer prejudice and suspicion of authority.
Creative thinkers need finely tuned reality filters to create and invent useful things. Yet if it weren't for our ability to suspend skepticism, we'd have no use for literature, love songs, movies, and jokes. A good story, no matter how fantastic, works only if it resonates with our own experience and strikes a chord of believability.
On the other side of the coin, lack of skepticism does us all a disservice. Not just because, in this case, honest lawyers might be abused, but because truth can be so much more interesting. For example, in my search for the source of the cigar-arson story, I found no end of other innovative and amusing urban legends, just as funny, some even more ridiculous, but all enlightening.
I guess we just have to learn when to question and when to enjoy an honest invention.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.