Last night I had the strangest dream...
“So what seems to be the problem?”
Here I was, face to face with a real live shrink. I had never been to a therapist’s office before, but my wife told me I needed to have my head examined when I explained to her that we had 300,000 bushels of corn in the bins and no money in the bank.
Now the doctor wanted me to tell him about my problem.
“Doc, it’s like this. I’m afraid to sell my grain.”
Dr. Sniglfritz paused before responding. “Why? Isn’t that why you farm, to grow stuff and then sell it to make animal feed and corn chips and whatever else they do with it?”
“Doc, it’s not that simple. I’m pretty sure I’m getting ripped off whenever I make a sale.”
“Why’s that?”
“It seems like whenever I sell, the market goes up the next day. So I feel like a total loser for selling at a subpar price. The way I figure it, if I sell at $3.75 a bushel and corn goes to $3.80 the next day, I’ve just lost $15,000! So, it makes sense to me that, if the market is going up, I should just wait to see if it goes up again the next day.”
“…And what happens?”
“Well, sometimes it does go up again.”
“Do you sell then?”
“Of course not! It might go up again the next day, too. Do you think I’m nuts?”
“Okay, what about when the market is going down? What happens then?”
“I couldn’t possibly sell if the price is going down, either,” I replied. “I don’t want to sell in a down market!”
“I don’t know much about farming, but didn’t prices rally last summer when people were worried about the weather?”