Does this ring a bell?
I had a high school class ring. My grandmother bought it for me when I was a Junior, and it was the first piece of jewelry I ever owned. My taste in personal ornamentation is somewhat reserved, but I do wear a nice watch, a wedding ring, and a celtic ring my wife bought me in Scotland. I cherished that class ring, however, and am still infuriated, 18 years after it was stolen during the burglerizing of my apartment in San Diego. They got my ring, and three handguns.
I don’t care about the guns, but I STILL care about that ring. In fact, it is a dream of mine to someday discover that there were three people involved in the burglary, and that during an argument after the robbery, one of the scumbags shot the other two with the .357 magnum they took from me, killing one and paralyzing the other. In my fantasy, the shooter is on death row, and the paralyzed one (who had committed many crimes before mine) lives on welfare in a hovel at the foot of the Coronado Bay Bridge, having only his most basic needs attended to by a very disgruntled (and crazy) fraudulently credentialed male nurse who steals from him.
Oh yeah, I’m still a little pissed about that robbery. Of all the things I had, they took the one thing that couldn’t be replaced, a gift fromy my grandmother.
The company that made the ring, Jostens, now offers class rings to those like me who have lost theirs, or those folks who for one reason or another, didn’t get one when they were in school. So, I surfed by the website, and using their online ring designer, recreated my stolen ring.
I remember getting the check from my grandmother to pay for the ring. In 1976, my ring cost $80.18. Inputting that amount into the Inflation Calculator (based on the CPI), my ring should now cost $275.27.
Jostens, though, wants a little more.
$559.95.
Ouch.
That guy on death row’s lucky I can’t get to him.
