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The Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy Breakfast Series, Episode Four
Dateline: East Texas Diner, October 10, 2024
Joe Eddy: You watched the news last night?
Billy Wayne: I tried but sleep overtook me.
Joe Eddy: That Hurricane Milton packed a heck of a wallop. I guess it would have been worse if it had hit Tampa square on, but still plenty of devastation.
Billy Wayne: That’s one of the benefits of living in East Texas. Hurricanes can’t find us here.
Joe Eddie: Well, you’re right but remember that ice storm back in 2000? We just got over the panic of the Apocalypse over the computers imploding because of them not being programmed to account for a new century and then, Bam! We were iced in for days. Out at my place, Pine trees accumulated ice until they started snapping and crashing all around us. It sounded like bombs going off. I was sure one would snap and crush us where we lay.
Billy Wayne: I remember. You didn’t get crushed, and the world didn’t crash over the computers acting out. I didn’t have a computer, so I figured my crops wouldn’t know any better than to bloom come Spring and my cows would eat the hay I put out anyway and give me milk for butter. I wasn’t too fussed about the end of the world.
Joe Eddy: Pay attention. The point here is that disaster may find you even if you don’t have oceanfront property in Florida.
Billy Wayne: Mine found me in my first marriage. I called her Hurricane Hannah.
Joe Eddy: She was a fine woman.
Billy Wayne: ‘Parently that professor in Commerce agreed. Anyhow”¦
Joe Eddy: Did you ever know anything about adjusting?
Billy Wayne: Adjustin’ what?
Joe Eddy: Just adjusting what adjusters adjust.
Billy Wayne: Are you delirious or is that another one of your tongue-twisters like ‘Peter Piper’ to improve your speechifying? Are you teaching Sunday school again? I might be too sick to come. By adjusting, you mean like a chiropractor.
Joe Eddy: I am talking about insurance, you idiot. Insurance adjusters.
Billy Wayne: Oh, them. They’re like lawyers, thick as fleas, and not worth the powder it’d take to blow them up.
Joe Eddy: Way I heard it, it’s a heck of a way to make a livin’. My son’s friend’s uncle is one. Little Joe says the fellow is an independent adjuster, and he’ll make a year’s wage in a couple of months, if it’s a big enough storm he’s working.
Billy Wayne: Sounds like a lawyer all right. Farmin’ is the opposite of adjustin’. I suppose.
Joe Eddy: How’s that?
Billy Wayne: Well, we work all year for a couple of months’ wage.
Joe Eddye: (laughs)
Lucille the Waitress: (Laughs, too, and warms up their coffee)
Joe Eddy: What about you, hon?
Lucille the Waitress: What about me what?
Joe Eddy: What about you being an insurance adjuster and making all that money in a short time after a hurricane hits Florida?
Lucille the Waitress: Then who would pour your coffee and referee your nonsense? No, your generous tips and riveting repartee are all I need to consider myself wealthy.
Joe Eddy: ‘Repartee.’ That’s a good word.
Billy Wayne: You gonna use it in your Sunday school lesson?
Joe Eddy:
Billy Wayne: Speaking of lawyers.
Joe Eddy: No one was speaking of lawyers but you.
Billy Wayne: Did you hear they were thinking of replacing those white rats they use in science labs with lawyers?
Joe Eddy:
Lucille the Waitress:
Joe Eddy: (sighs). Go on”¦
Billy Wayne: Yeah, they said it makes sense because there are more lawyers than rats and you don’t get as emotionally attached.
Lucille the Waitress: No more coffee for you. Whose turn is it to pay?
Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy: His.
1Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy is a series.
Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy are characters inspired by two men I saw one morning while having coffee with my grandfather. Billy Wayne is a tall, rugged Texas farmer (I assume), and Joe Eddie is a stout, meaty businessman. Lucille the Waitress could easily fit into any roadside diner. Since they are fictional, I reserve the right to put them into any era but always in the morning over coffee with Lucille attending to them. Here is the first in the series, if you want context.
