Tommy P. Says: "I thought my bank loved me, but it turns out I just don't understand 'interest'."

Interest means different things to different people.  Let me give some examples.  For Charlie Brown, interest is the Little Red Head Girl.  For Lucy, it is Schroder.  For Schroder it is the piano.  For evil geniuses it is power, absolute power, the power to rule the world, or crush it like a bug.  Well... thats what, I mean, at least that is what I heard, it, uh, you know, sounds plausible.  And moving on I like cookies, not power, but cookies.  You know, I really like those pink and white Grandmothers cookies.  I can down a whole bag without even breaking a sweat.

Interest must sweat however, according to J. Ruben Clark "Interest never sleeps nor sickens nor dies; it never goes to the hospital; it works on Sundays and holidays; it never takes a vacation; it never visits nor travels; it takes no pleasure; it is never laid off work nor discharged from employment; it never works on reduced hours..."  If his statement is true however, I must not have interest in cookies, because I take pleasure in them, perhaps I just have a passing fancy or infatuation for them as opposed to real interest.  Or perhaps, ol' J. Rube was talking about a different type of interest.  I know for a fact that there are a minimum of two types, simple, and compound.  With pioneering efforts led by firms such as Tyco, and Enron we may discover yet more types of interest, one can only hope. 

Because of Interest's work ethic, it was called "the strongest force in the Universe" by none other than Al Einstein, who is generally accepted as being a rather smart guy.  I thought the strongest was the Strong Nuclear force.  However, that force only operates over short distances, Einstein may have been looking at the total area under the curve(the integral for those math buffs out there), and interest does not diminish with distance, or time (in fact most interest usually goes up (prime +17%) with time, at least on credit cards); which would give it infinite power.  Douglas Addams, another great thinker demonstrated the power of interest in his published work "The Restaurant the end of the Universe."  Here, despite high prices for everything on the menu, it is quite easy to pay.  Deposit a penny in an account and by the time your dinner arrives compound interest will have swollen it to a large sum of money, this does require time travel.  Doug forgot two things however, first, the minimum opening balance, and second, bank fees.  While the first might be avoided, the bank fees would have taken the account into the red, leaving the bank patron owing untold sums of money.  Not making out like a bandit.