Dumb Luck Trumps Terrible Advice
Timothy Dexter’s new neighbors in Newburyport disliked him as much as his old ones in Charlestown had. The tacky McMansion with its garish columns topped by wooden statues was bad enough. Worse, the new arrival turned his residence into a seedy pleasure dome that locals likened to a whorehouse. Prostitutes waltzed in and out at all hours, long nights of loud and drunken parties became a norm, and the fine interiors, including curtains once owned by a French queen, were soon covered in “unseemly stains, offensive to sight and smell“. His wife bailed out, and moved elsewhere. When Dexter bought ships and announced his intent to get into international trade, fed up neighbors offered him terribly dumb advice, in the hope that he’d bankrupt himself and be forced to move.
One of them recommended that he export bed-warming pans to the Caribbean – a tropical region known for its hot weather, and decided lack of a need for bed warmers. Dexter bit, bought 42,000 pans, and shipped them to the Caribbean. The traders laughed themselves to tears at the idiot who’d shipped bed warmers to the tropics. Then their laughter turned to astonishment. Of course, nobody in the Caribbean was interested in the least in bed warmers. However, Dexter’s agent redesignated them as “ladles”, and suddenly sugar and molasses plantation owners could not get enough of them. As seen below, it would not be the last time that dumb luck allowed Dexter to prosper despite terrible advice.
