*ring ring ring*
“Hi, this is your new lawn care expert! How is everything going?
“Well, fine, I guess. We’ve only had one treatment so far.”
“That’s great! Well I’m calling to let you know we’ll be doing a grub treatment in the next couple of weeks.”
“Okay?”
“It’s a one-time treatment we’ll do that targets grubs.”
“Why?”
“You certainly don’t want grubs in your lawn.”
“Why not?”
“Well, they burrow into the soil and destroy the root system of your grass.”
“Oh.”
“So we’ll come out and do a treatment for you to prevent that.”
“Is it included in our plan?”
“No, and normally it’s a gazillion-billion-trillion dollars but today I’m offering it to you for $68.”
“I see. Well, we’re not interested.”
“Well, you really should do a treatment, even if you do it yourself. The grubs cause brown spots in your lawn. They’re the reason you can lift up whole areas of grass like a carpet.”
“Okay.”
“So you’ll do it yourself?”
“No.”
Awkward silence.
“I see. What if I offer it to you for $58? I can do that.”
“Are you in Maryland?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you physically in Maryland?”
“Well, no.”
“So you personally are not our new lawn care expert, right?”
“No, but…”
“Let me finish. So you haven’t actually seen our lawn, right?”
“Well, no.”
“We just started with your company and had our first treatment a few weeks ago. We mainly did it to escape the crushing guilt of being that one house on the street that looks abandoned because our yard is so ugly. It’s the whole reason we decided to try your service.”
“I see.”
“Our actual lawn care expert left us a message after he left. It was four printed pages of the things he found in our lawn: clover, dandelions, buttercups, ivy, mushrooms, lava, penguins.”
“Penguins?”
“Stay with me here. You know what he didn’t find?”
“What’s that?”
“Grass. There is literally no grass in our lawn. Our lawn is comprised entirely of things that aren’t grass.”
“I see.”
“So really, grubs might be an improvement. Maybe they’ll attack the root system of the weeds and we can lift them all up like a carpet and start from scratch.”
“Um.”
“Bring on the grubs, is what I’m saying.”
“Bring on the grubs?”
“They couldn’t possibly make our lawn worse at this point.”
“So I’ll just go ahead and mark you as a ‘No’ for the Grub Treatment.”
“Thank you. Tell you what – if our lawn care expert does a great job this year, maybe we’ll actually have grass to protect from grubs next year.”
“Sounds like a deal.”
Gauntlet.
Thrown.
###
