Oil's Well That...
Apr. 1st, 2014 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeAs you may recall, Lisa's father passed away last year. We've been dealing with the settlement of the estate with her siblings for the past year (that's one of the reasons on our drive to Worldcon we detoured through Santa Fe; there were papers needing signing there and it was convenient to get it done in person rather than have the papers shuttle back and forth). Different parts of the estate went in different ways, of course; two siblings split the property in Mehama between them, for instance, while Lisa primarily got a share of her father's investments and some of the physical stuff (like old radios) her siblings did not want.
Lisa's grandfather worked in the Texas oilfields early in the last century, and because the drillers were short on cash, the workers received stock in these speculative start-up oil companies, and while most workers sold the stock quickly for what they could get, Lisa's grandfather held on to his. Apparently Lisa's father (who inherited his father's stock) never actually paid attention to how that little Texas oil-field venture was purchased by another company, which was bought by a bigger one, and so on and so forth, and how the various splits and whatnot affected the holdings. Complicating things was that the original records and stock certificates were apparently stored in the World Trade Center, and were obviously destroyed on 9/11. But things finally got cleared up last week, and to our astonishment it appears that Lisa now owns about 37.5% of ExxonMobil.
This of course changes everything. We're not likely to move (we like it here), but now we can afford to buy things (starting with the rest of the block on which Fernley House sits) we never though we could buy. But I'm not sure we want to stay invested in Big Oil. We're thinking maybe buying a large block of Union Pacific would be good. (We'd go after BNSF, but Warren Buffet took it private.) Maybe if we bought a seat on the UP Board they'd consider restoring Fernley's passenger station across the street from our house. Surely Amtrak wouldn't object to establishing a flag stop here if we paid them enough.
Lisa's grandfather worked in the Texas oilfields early in the last century, and because the drillers were short on cash, the workers received stock in these speculative start-up oil companies, and while most workers sold the stock quickly for what they could get, Lisa's grandfather held on to his. Apparently Lisa's father (who inherited his father's stock) never actually paid attention to how that little Texas oil-field venture was purchased by another company, which was bought by a bigger one, and so on and so forth, and how the various splits and whatnot affected the holdings. Complicating things was that the original records and stock certificates were apparently stored in the World Trade Center, and were obviously destroyed on 9/11. But things finally got cleared up last week, and to our astonishment it appears that Lisa now owns about 37.5% of ExxonMobil.
This of course changes everything. We're not likely to move (we like it here), but now we can afford to buy things (starting with the rest of the block on which Fernley House sits) we never though we could buy. But I'm not sure we want to stay invested in Big Oil. We're thinking maybe buying a large block of Union Pacific would be good. (We'd go after BNSF, but Warren Buffet took it private.) Maybe if we bought a seat on the UP Board they'd consider restoring Fernley's passenger station across the street from our house. Surely Amtrak wouldn't object to establishing a flag stop here if we paid them enough.
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no subject
Date: 2014-04-01 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-01 03:05 pm (UTC)FWIW, back in early 2008, Vanguard (who manages the UP employees' 401K), kept telling me that I had too much stock tied up in UP and how that was Not A Good Thing. That summer I finally said go ahead and diversify.
Yeah, I was not a very happy man in the fall and winter of that year. :)
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Date: 2014-04-01 03:15 pm (UTC)I would also nudge UP toward getting rid of the Sierra bottlenecks imposed upon them by their cheese-paring predecessor who started selling the furniture to keep paying dividends. I can sort of understand why they singled the summit line (the old line around the outside of the mountain was a nightmare, particularly during bad winters), but they certainly should restore the double track at Yuba Gap. Given the slow speeds over The Hill, capacity improvements there surely pay off quicker than, say, doubling the lines east of Fernley. (It would be relatively simple from a civil engineering perspective to double the track east of Fernley across the 40 Mile Desert, I would think, but that would just cause trains to get stuck at Sparks waiting for a window to head to Roseville.)
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Date: 2014-04-01 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2014-04-01 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-02 12:22 am (UTC)We wanted a funny April Fool instead of the stupid or nasty or bitter ones that are out there, which are no fun at all.
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Date: 2014-04-02 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2014-04-01 08:35 pm (UTC)This is a great AF. Plausible, based on reality, good lead up. Well done, sir!
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Date: 2014-04-02 12:26 am (UTC)Thanks for the compliment. We liked it.