machers

A macher, pronounced with that distinctively Yiddish velar fricative, is the sort of person who could convince you that you need to buy a new lawnmower together with an extended 10-year warranty despite your lack of lawn ownership. A macher knows what you want before you know what you want, and as it turns out, he also happens to be selling. Wouldn't you know it!

Without machers, we'd be stuck in a gloomy world of living within our means. It would be a world where everything pretty much stays the same. Innovation would be discouraged; fear of the unknown would reign over curiosity about the undiscovered. The macher is the storyteller, the dreamer, the playwright always ready to tell us about what could be, never satisfied with what is.

But one must always be wary of the macher. His siren song of endless possibilities and bountiful abundance hides an ugly truth about his motives: more than the sale of any product or service, the macher desires nothing more than for you to buy his story. It's the sort of validation-seeking behavior so prevalent among narcissists. It's no coincidence that good salesmen more often than not have a very low opinion of themselves. Deep down, a dreadful sense of fraudulence is always lurking under those designer suits.

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"It's toasted," Don said, smiling as he enthusiastically underlined the words on the blackboard.

"But everybody else's tobacco is toasted," Lee Jr. retorted, confused by the statement of the obvious.

"No, everybody else's tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike is toasted," Don replied.

Or was it Dick?