A man walks into an antique store and starts looking around. All of the sudden he spies a statue of a huge brass rat in the corner. He falls in love with it, and so he takes it to the cashier.
"Aye, you like my brass rat, eh?" says the old grizzly cashier. “There’s quite a story attached to that one, there is.”
"Um, yeah...how much for it?" replies our friend.
"Aye, that’ll be twenty five bucks for the rat -- but 200 dollars for the story," he replied.
"I'll just take the rat, without the story." says the customer. The cashier is surprised but, as requested he gives the man the brass rat and takes the twenty five dollars. He leaves the store, his precious brass rat tucked under his arm. As he leaves the store, he notices a rat leave right behind him and starts following him.
Soon he begins to notice that a few more rats are following him. He walks a few more blocks and sees the number of rats behind him is increasing exponentially. This continued until there were virtually millions of rats behind him.
Now he’s getting a little worried. Afraid of this mass following him, he ran towards the docks by the sea. When he reached the end of a pier and had nowhere to go, he stops and, out of desperation, throws the brass rat into the water, closes his eyes and prays.
Now, a minute or so goes by and he hears a lot of splashing. He opens his eyes to see the rats jumping into the sea where he threw the brass rat.
The man ran back to the antique store. The old cashier was chuckling and said. "So now do you want the story?"
"No," said the man, "but have you got any brass politicians?"
