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I have often been asked over the years how I originated the idea for the company, which you all know by now, has grown to multinational proportions and made me the world's wealthiest man.

 However, up until now I have not seen fit to tell the tale, because as you will soon see, it is possible to interpret the details in such a way as to make me appear to be a damned fool, instead of the brilliant innovative mind that people take me for, and all things considered, I undoubtedly am. But as I am getting on in years, and since it is becoming ever clearer as time goes on that it's where you got to that counts, and not how you got there, I am now ready to reveal the full story of the origin of The Misery Loves Company.

 The story starts when I was forty-one years old and suffering from what most people would describe as a mid-life crisis. I did not identify it as such because I did not think it possible in someone as emotionally undeveloped as myself; and besides, the primary reasons for my funk were quite apparent to me: I was sick to the core of that daily bloodletting called a "career" (having tried at least six of them by that time), and secondarily, being single left me with no-one to psychologically abuse when I got home each night in order to relieve some of the pressure. All in all, an entirely unsustainable situation, enough to prompt a man to pick up his marbles one winter, nuke his bridges, and escape to Mexico. Which I did.

 I ended up in a fair-sized town called San Miguel de Allende, postcard perfect and distinguished by a large population of gringos æ every last one of them an artist or a writer. Their main business, though, as far as I could make out, was to walk around all day and exchange visits, in a ritualistic search for something to do. Their days slipped by painlessly, the bright Mexican sun as dependable as an old friend each afternoon, followed by bracing, chilly starlit nights—the same chilly nights that play a crucial role in my story.

 I was staying in a charming inn, and as is quite common in Mexico, had in earlier days been a luxurious hacienda with high stone walls enclosing living areas, open-air patios, gardens, and walkways. The guest units consisted of one or two small rooms and private bath, and some had kitchen alcoves with the bare essentials for cooking. Because of the moderate climate, Mexican construction does not normally incorporate insulation; and heat, in houses that have it, is commonly supplied by small natural gas heaters. One of these was built into a small fireplace in the corner of my bedroom, but in spite of shivering in my bed on many nights, I never used it. I never used it because I am what you might call a gas paranoid.

 I am not a psychologist, but I believe my condition derives from both a traumatic event in my youth and from an awareness of an objective fact. The event occurred in junior high school when I attempted to light a gas furnace in metal shop. For reasons unknown there was a sizeable concentration of gas in the air around the furnace, and when I sparked it the ensuing explosion knocked me off my feet and smoked my eyebrows. For the record, this was the second time I had been stunned in shop class, ranking just below the time I discovered in a painful way that the humorless instructor fully expected us to refer to "male" and "female" parts of tools without laughing.

 The objective fact is that beside the ability to blow you to well-done pieces, gas can also kill you painlessly and silently, without leaving a mark. Say that the flow of gas to your heater is interrupted momentarily for some strange reason. The flame goes out. The gas flow resumes. You don't answer your alarm clock the next morning. You have to have respect for something that can kill you in such wildly divergent styles. So much so that I preferred to wear socks to bed.

 Until the night it was so cold that I decided to strike a compromise. I would fire up the heater for an hour before I went to bed just enough to take the hard chill out of the room, and then turn it off upon retiring. I nervously lit a match and inserted it into the grid, stood off to the side at arm's length, and very slowly turned on the gas. It ignited with a weak "pop," and I congratulated myself on having overcome another psychological barrier in the path of rational living. (I did shut the heater off though, before going to bed; you can only advance so far in one day.) I slept soundly and comfortably for the first time in weeks.

 I awoke the next morning full of energy, and prepared to embark on the ten minute walk to the central plaza, the primary gathering place for all the artists and writers looking for something to do. A quick check of my jeans' pocket revealed that my carrying money was running low, so it was time to visit my hidden wallet containing $400 in American and Mexican currency, credit cards, driver's license, and most critical of all, my Mexican tourist permit (a document you dared not soil or tear, to say nothing of lose).

 It wasn't until I started walking toward the fireplace that the horrible realization ambushed me ― I had been using the back of the gas heater as the perfect hiding place for my wallet ― the heater that I never used.

 Until last night.

 My heart doing flips somewhere around the groin area, I reached into the heater and felt for the wallet. It was still there! At least as a burnt remnant. I delicately pried it open where I thought an opening should be, ashes crumbling everywhere. The only thing recognizable inside was some greenish shards of American currency. (There was absolutely nothing left of the Mexican bills, which perhaps indicates the relative strength of the American dollar.)

 I did have additional funds in the form of traveler's checks, which, along with my passport, were hidden in another location. (I refer you to the venerable maxim about eggs and baskets.) But I most certainly was not in the position of having money to burn. I occupied myself for the next couple of hours with the urgent business at hand: going to the bank to get more cash, and then explaining to the local office of the Mexican Tourist Bureau that due to a small conflagration in my room (in which, luckily, no one died), the charred remnants that I held in the little plastic bag were all that remained of my tourist permit and a sizeable chunk of my travel funds. I learned from that experience that a bag full of burnt money will get you far more sympathy than a wooden leg or an eye patch, and the normally recalcitrant officials promised to expedite the necessary paperwork for a new permit.

 I spent the rest of the afternoon playing solitary mind games, trying to rationalize away the queasy feeling in my stomach that at least, had saved me the expense of having to buy lunch.

 Well, let's see, I'd parted with $400 (or more) plenty of times without a second thought. A weekend in New York City and there you go. There was that suit I bought last year. How about that time I stormed Las Vegas, armed with that Blackjack system? And the "strong buy" recommendation from my former broker.

 So what was so different about this? The answer quite literally continued to stare me straight in the face ― that little plastic bag full of ashes.

 My misery was interrupted when Bill, a recently retired French teacher (and now writer) from California, stopped by to share some tales of woe with me. First off, having become more educated in the business of Mexican rugs, he was convinced that the hand woven rug he had paid $50 for in one of the border towns was in reality, "made by machine in Taiwan."

 As if any more were needed to ruin the trip for him, he had also just been informed that because of rising costs in Mexico, the landlord of the local garage in which he was storing his car was hiking the monthly rent an incredible 317%, from $6.00 to $25.00! And, yes, he realized that in the States the rent would be more like $100.00 a month, but it was the principle of the thing.

 I said, "Bill, if you think you've got troubles, listen to this," and I told him my story. Showed him my ash bag, too.

 He was genuinely sorry for me. "My God," he said, "I feel foolish now for even mentioning my trivial problems."

 And his mood had clearly changed. The weight of his own concerns had been lifted right off his back.

 That night I had a visit from Lou, a computer engineer (and now sculptor) on sabbatical from his job in Colorado. Lou had made a contribution of $50 to a Mexico City pickpocket a few weeks earlier and had been depressed about it ever since. "How could I have been so stupid?" was the recurrent theme of his by now familiar lament.

 "Sit down, Lou," I told him, "I want you to hear this one." And I went through the whole thing again, props and all.

 "Wow," he said when I had finished, "Now I don't feel so bad about what happened to me."

 "You know," I said, "I think I should start charging people to tell them my story, because it seems to make everyone feel better."

 And with that flash of insight The Misery Loves Company was born.

 Within twenty-four hours I was on a plane headed back to the States, driven by pure inspiration. I was convinced that I had stumbled on a way to capitalize on a universal element in human nature, an element almost everyone recognizes in himself but seldom acknowledges: worse news about other people takes the edge off bad news about yourself.

 Once home I went about setting up an office and began to offer cash payments for the rights to the complete details, with photographs, of various personal disasters. (The payments were on a sliding scale, relative to the magnitude of the misfortune.) Within two weeks I was overwhelmed with responses, and with the help of the very first two employees of my company, I soon built up an extensive library of cases, indexed by my own Disaster Decimal System (DDS).

 And then we were ready to roll. The system worked brilliantly right from the beginning. For example, a client calls up and tells us he's depressed because he recently lost an arm in an industrial accident, and he wants to know if we have a case on record that will make him feel better.

 Using the DDS index, we go straight to section 29.2 of our case library (Limb Loss, Twice), where we find a folder containing complete details (with photos) of one Orville Pickett's loss of both arms in a wheat combine. Multiplying the Disaster Decimal of 29.2 by our Fee Constant of 3, we quickly arrive at a service charge of $87.60 for sending our client a duplicate of Orville Pickett's folder. (This provides an excellent illustration of the marvelous versatility of the DDS. Since the greater the decimal rating the worse the disaster, the system provides at one stroke a mechanism for both referencing and fee calculation.)

 So extensive was our case library that in our first year we were forced to turn down only one potential client, a sales rep from Dayton who called us for help after coming home early from work and discovering his wife in bed with the German shepherd that was wearing his satin smoking jacket. To help him would have required a case on file with a DDS rating of at least a 214.7, and at the time our file topped out at 195.5. I'm happy to say that now such a client would be considered routine.

 The rest of the story is a matter of public record: the opening of branch offices in twenty-nine foreign countries; cover stories in Time and Newsweek; and recent selection as one of the companies used to compute the Dow Jones Industrial average.

 And now that I have revealed the true story of the origin of my company, I have instructed our case study librarian to enter the full account, with photos, under DDS number 14.5 (Idiotic Money Loss, by burning; $400 to $500). It is available for only $43.50 (the full-color photos alone are worth it).

 So please, next time disaster strikes close to home, think of us and remember our company motto: Oy, so you think you've got problems?

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