Dear Calculus Student,
My big brother says to welcome to you to Franklin & Marshall College. So I'll say "welcome", although I think you could have spent your money better investing it in turkeys than in four years of writing 20-page papers on books that some dead guy wrote and that you'll never read again.
My big brother also says I should introduce myself to you, and so I'll do that, too. I'm Brent Trachte, the younger (and better-looking) twin brother of your AVPADF -- that's "Associate Vice President for Advisement and Dean or Freshmen" to you. We're both 6-foot-1 and both natty dressers, but the good family influence on my bro ends there. My AVPADF brother may not be the heart throb that I turned out to be, and he didn't have my own good sense to dump the ivy-covered halls for the big bucks that come with turkeys, but I'll say this for him: he's got good taste in relatives.
The other thing that my big brother Kent is good for is letting me mooch off of him, and this time he's good enough to let me mooch your brains. Me, I figured that Algebra is a foreign country and why should I go there when there's running water here in Pennsylvania? I mean I know all about a + b = b + a, and I can punch buttons on a calculator with the best of them, but what does that matter to a turkey, really?
But anyway, here are you guys who are real wizards with all that logarithm-trigonometry-area-of-a-parabola kind of stuff, and here I am with a water tank, and I figured you might know the formula for how much water it holds.
See, in turkey farming, it's all about water. The turkeys get enough water, they're fine. They get too much water, and they go a little loopy. They don't get enough water, and you sell your farm to Butterball and go back to school. So, when I saw this water tank, I thought "great! This looks like just the thing my turkeys need!"
The other thing (there's always another thing, isn't there?) is that the loan officer at the bank was unhappy when I just wrote down on the form 10,000 gallons (pure uneducated guesswork), and for obvious reasons it's bad to make a loan officer unhappy. To get the moolah for this new water tank, I need to have "documentary or supporting evidence of the storage capacity".
I asked some other braniac about this, and all he said was, "why don't you just fill it up and measure how much water fits?" Yeah, right! First of all, filling something that big takes about a half a week, and second of all, what are you going to measure it with? Scoop it all back out with a milk jug? So much for a college education.
That's where you come in. I'll send you a photo of the water tank (along with yours truly), and you send me the "supporting evidence of storage capacity" to convince the bank. For Pete's sake, don't go all e = mc2 on us! I know how you brainy types are! Listening to a loan officer is bad enough.
I'm afraid that the business is little tight right now, so that your consulting fee will only be about $200. But of course favors mean favors, and there'll be a great place for you in my organization when my AVPADF brother finally lets you out of that nunnery.
Remember, it's not what you know; it's who you know -- and now you know me.
Sincerely,
Brent Trachte
CEO, Fowl Play, Inc.