Hi all. I’m not usually much of an MPSIMSer, but I just read this story a few minutes ago and had to share it.
We should keep an eye on this guy. Sounds like he might be in the running for a Darwin Award one of these days…
Reminds me of a friend of mine - an otherwise intelligent individual who found out he’d been putting too much money into his IRA and he’d have to pay taxes on the excess. So he showed them - he pulled ALL of his money out of the IRA, thereby incurring penalties on top of taxes.
People get weird about money…
I work for the government. A few years back, the government decided to save some money by increasing our pay “lag” by two weeks - this is the time between when you do the work and when you get paid. Rather than skip a paycheck, they reduced four consecutive paychecks by 25%.
Most of us were angry about this unilateral decision but some people said they were not going to accept it. I asked them how they were planning on doing that. I pointed out the state was going to issue them a reduced paycheck and they had two options - cash it and get 75% or not cash it and get nothing. The government would be happy either way. But there were people who as a “matter of principle” refused to accept the reduced paychecks.
All I can say is, “What a dumbass!” and “Are you serious?”
Yes, this is yet another example of how weird ordinary people can behave when it comes to money. Though most would only have complained, like the people who win cash prizes of millions and then get angry when they have to pay some relatively small percentage of it as tax.
Being a somewhat regular Ryanair customer and knowing their ways of seeking publicity it doesn’t surprise me at all that they’ve turned this incident into a marketing opportunity, complete with humorous poll options and snark (“clearly he had much more expensive tastes”) from firm’s head of communications: Ryanair news release.
I want to know what he does when he figures out just WHAT he did. What will he try to eat next?
I’m not sure what I’d do if I was informed of this sort of thing, I’d probably be suspicious of some sort of scam. I wouldn’t eat the ticket out of sheer frustration that it couldn’t be cashed on the spot, though.