Steve: The most vindictive divorcee I ever met

[tailfins]

Steve's wife became consistently frigid and cranky while their kids were still in middle school. Back then, he told me that he was going to divorce her when he had his "ducks in a row". Back then, he started diverting money to the kids college funds instead of a retirement plan. He was an IT guy making six figures. He started losing interest in keeping his skills current. He was eventually laid off. He worked for a Massachusetts company, so he collected a good weekly unemployment check. He started draining his retirement fund for living expenses and giving his kids almost anything they asked for. By this time his kids were towards the end of high school. He never went beyond a perfunctory effort to find a job, instead buying broken cars, fixing them and reselling them. After ten years of careful planning, his kids were in college and he was broke with no job skills. He was of the mindset that he would rather live in a shack than let his wife get a dime. He finally filed for divorce. I wanted to work my "magic" and rebuild his career, but he let his ambition die. Now that he achieved his goal of not letting his wife get a dime from him, he appears content to live out the rest of his life in poverty. His kids consider him a cheerful, generous dad, giving him credit for sending them to college, while they consider their mom a cranky, complaining stingy old troublemaker.

[indago]

Steve's wife became consistently frigid and cranky while their kids were still in middle school. Back then, he told me that he was going to divorce her when he had his "ducks in a row". Back then, he started diverting money to the kids college funds instead of a retirement plan. He was an IT guy making six figures. He started losing interest in keeping his skills current. He was eventually laid off. He worked for a Massachusetts company, so he collected a good weekly unemployment check. He started draining his retirement fund for living expenses and giving his kids almost anything they asked for. By this time his kids were towards the end of high school. He never went beyond a perfunctory effort to find a job, instead buying broken cars, fixing them and reselling them. After ten years of careful planning, his kids were in college and he was broke with no job skills. He was of the mindset that he would rather live in a shack than let his wife get a dime. He finally filed for divorce. I wanted to work my "magic" and rebuild his career, but he let his ambition die. Now that he achieved his goal of not letting his wife get a dime from him, he appears content to live out the rest of his life in poverty. His kids consider him a cheerful, generous dad, giving him credit for sending them to college, while they consider their mom a cranky, complaining stingy old troublemaker.

Reminds me of Murphy, in Murphy's War, when he hoisted that live torpedo with the barge crane and dropped it on the sunken German submarine, and shouting: "I have you", jumping up and down with glee. When the torpedo hit and exploded on the submarine, it blew the stern end of the barge off, the crane collapsed, trapping him on the deck, and he went down with the barge.