Four cents that made my night

Two heartwarming stories:

Earlier tonight, I went to Wendy’s because I was so hungry that I couldn’t wait to make my own meal, or even wait for In-N-Out. My total was $6.04. I handed the cashier $7. He looked at it, said, “It’s cool, bro,” and handed back one dollar. I was pretty exhausted and hungry at the time so those four cents made me feel good.

And just a few minutes ago, I checked out the latest XKCD:

Aww. I was even more excited at first, because I believed it to be a parody of Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, which I still have on VHS somewhere at home, taped off of TV at some point in the ’80s. It’s fun to watch stuff taped off of TV, because the first part of the special is always commercial-free, as my parents were savvy enough to pause the tape during the breaks, but then at some point they fall asleep or get distracted, and you get to see old commercials for OshKosh B’Gosh and old promos for that night’s upcoming edition of Action News.

After taking note of the title, however, a quick Google search let me know that it was the title of a short story. I assumed that the story had the basic plot I was familiar with from the Sesame Street special, but I wanted to be sure, as I fact-check all of my blog entries. But the short story is about a page and a half long, and what am I, a grad student? So I went to the Wikipedia article instead. Boom— plot in six sentences. Thank you, Internet. It’s 1:11.