#18 Nouble Degative

I admit it, I’m easily confused. I’m either always looking too deep to see the plain-as-the-nose-on-my-face obvious or I bounce off the surface like a lady bug on a hot skillet. So I get this thing in the mail for one of the banks the other day. And it’s encouraging me to triple mortgage my house with an incredibly low interest rate that they promise is absolutely permanent, but which I know from personal experience is really only as temporary as a mayfly coyote date. I once had a gal from a large financial institution, when the rate was raised on a consolidation loan I was stupid enough to take out, explain to me that “fixed” didn’t really mean fixed as in permanent, it meant fixed as in fixed until they decided to raise it with 30 days notice to the entire class of people that they promised the fixed rate to. I said: “I get it. You mean 'fixed' as in carnival midway game fixed.” End of conversation.
Anyhow it’s been getting pretty hard for financial institutions lately; rates just keep getting lower and it’s harder and harder to attract borrowers to refi again and again. So they’ve been reduced to taking up that bewildering claim that the car dealers make. They’re going to lend you money at “zero percent” interest. 0% interest. What am I missing here? Even writing 0% interest seems like a waste of ink. Zero-hundredths of zero. Hey, “no interest” is okay with me. It’s far more convincing and much less mathematical. I don’t have to figure anything out. No means no. Not zero-hundredths of no. Frankly, it makes me suspicious. I think maybe they’re trying to confuse me with that semi-double negative thing. Like that old slogan “nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” It leaves me worrying about it too long. And when I worry I have bad feelings. And when I have bad feelings I don’t like the company. And when I don’t like the company I pitch their stuff in the trash. Just a little warning corporate America: Remember the consumer KISS of death. Keep it Simple Stupid... or else.
So here’s what the mailer said: “Save with a Prime Rate + 0% APR!” Now they’ve really done it. They’ve coupled 0%, a concept I’m already suspicious of, and joined it to APR, which we all know, but none of us can figure out why, is always different than the “Nominal” interest rate. By different I of course mean higher. This I gotta see. If the APR of nothing turns out to be more than nothing, as I’m sure it will, then mathematics as we know it has gone to voodoo land. Because in this universe anything times nothing equals nothing. Or as the great Billy Preston once put it: nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Which, need I say, is exactly how much money I intend to borrow from this bank.
America, ya gotta love it.