A Heartworming Animal Story

            Ralph didn't see any great emails in his account but there was a survey from the pet store that he went to a couple days before to buy food for his pet guinea pigs.  He started to fill it out like he did with all the surveys, giving the service people a ranking of the highest scores possible, which was what he would want people to do for him. He knew that was helpful because he had just finished working in a retail store before enrolling in the college classes he was currently taking. The survey asked if he had any specific examples to share about how he had been helped in the store, and as he had been doing more and more frequently on all the surveys he filled out, he made up a story about how his cashier had helped him. In fact, he said she had saved his life and his pets' lives in an emergency involving a falling aquarium display and an attack from an animal rights extremist group.

            Three weeks later, Ralph got a letter summoning him to court.  It seemed that Ralphette, the cashier who had helped him, was being charged with some kind of misdemeanor based on an incident with a different customer that same day.

            When Ralph got to court, Ralphette, a wonderful and darling nice girl his same age, took the stand and described a situation where a yucky bad person tried to touch her on purpose when she was cashiering and told her she didn't know anything about pet food and then came around into the desk area to grab her shoulder and she had hit him and called him a kangaroo poacher and a french fried frog leg peddler.

            "I would do it all again the same," she said.

            The lawyers said they had checked all the paperwork and surveys from that day and found Ralph's survey suggesting that that very cashier had intervened in a hostage situation.  They wanted to charge Ralph with fraud.

            Ralph took the stand and answered some questions from the lawyers and then the judge, who seemed like a nice and reasonable person.

            "Ralph, do you have anything else to say about this situation?" the judge asked him.

            "Yes," said Ralph. "I was wondering if you guys ever do marriages at this court."

            "We do," said the judge, and she helped Ralph and Ralphette get married that afternoon.  Ralph and Ralphette loved each other a lot and adopted several rescued greyhounds and built a whole wall of aquariums in their house.