Idiocy By Proxy Is Indefensible

The dog days of summer are here, and the school year is over.  Kids love this time of year; for parents, it’s a mixed blessing – no more responsibility for getting the kids to school at the crack of dawn, but also, they must face the long, hot days and fill them with activities, camps, and play dates. The end of the academic year is marked in most schools by end-of-year recitals, plays, and fundraisers of all types.  Perhaps you can go and bid in a silent auction on Precious Boy or Girl’s priceless works of “art” – colorful swirls done with fantastically dirty fingers.

Or, perhaps you are out of town, so you proxy bid.  If this is your method of bidding, perhaps you should set a ceiling on those bids.

Enter Jon and Michelle Heinemann, who send their Precious Boy (who is 5 years old) to Cathedral School of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.  Out of town for the silent auction, they gave their proxy to make sure they would be the highest bidder on a painting done by Precious Boy and his classmates.

The price tag at the end of the day?  $50,000.00.  For a finger painting.

Furious, they have sued the school, saying that one of the teachers kept increasing the bids artificially so that the Heinemanns would have to pay some big bucks for Precious Boy’s creation.  They are suing not only to recover the price they paid for the painting, but for costs to send their children to another school, and a chauffeur to get them there.

Right.

There are several things we love about this story, which we found on Gawker here.  First, it’s that a couple of people who think they’re really smart may just have been outsmarted, and they are too fancy to admit it.  Second, it’s this line, as reported by Gawker:

Because the Heinemann’s were out of town, and had given instructions to a proxy to be the highest bid, they believed the largest possible damage for a finger painting (which are priceless) would fall around $3,000.

Because $3,000.00 would have been reasonable for a finger painting.

Finally, we love that the Heinemanns are also claiming that Precious Boy has been treated unfairly by the school since the auction went sour, claiming that he has had to do such things as hold the door for other students. Maybe I’m just a public school kid who didn’t know any better, but when I was five, it was cool to do such menial tasks as hold doors and erase blackboards for teachers.

A few other fun facts:  Jon Heinemann appears to be in finance in New York, running investment money management funds.  Here’s a website for The Heinemann Fund.  Michelle Heinemann was featured in something called “Black Tie Magazine” [pdf], which called her a “modern day Renaissance woman” and informed readers that she maintains several homes.  The Google has much more on this couple, if you’re curious.  Finally, according to its website, tuition  at Cathedral School of St. John the Divine in Manhattan for the upcoming school year rounds out at $38,425.  At least it includes lunch.

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