One fateful Saturday, the twins, Jen and Josh, shared the clothes on a trip into the city. Being only eight, the clothes were rather large for them; Josh wore the pants hiked up under his armpits and Jen sat on his shoulders wearing the shirt over Tom's head, hoping to pass themselves off as a typical teenager. It sort of worked as long as nobody looked too close. In Austin, nobody was likely to notice, anyway.
Nearing Callahan's general Store (Austin has all sorts of stores one might not expect to find in a modern city), a large dog attacked them as they crossed an intersection. knocking them down in front of the stopped cars. Jen fell off Josh's shoulders and tumbled into the the middle of the intersection, nearly getting run over by an H3 whose driver was blissfully talking into two cell phones at once. Gawking motorists slammed on their brakes or collided, eventually resulting in one of the largest traffic snarls in Austin's history.
News crews showed up and started interviewing the children. This, of course, attracted more news crews. As Josh and Jen explained why they had to share clothes the news coverage increased. Soon the entire family was the focus of national attention. By the end of the week they had appeared on CNN Headline News, Oprah, Glenn Beck, Leno, the Simpsons, and the covers of "Time" and "Rolling Stone" magazines.
The following Sunday Tom and his family were awakened early by the roar of diesels and the shrill blast of air horns. The sheer volume of noise shook them out of their beds. Scrambling to the front porch, they froze and stared at the changed landscape.
A seemingly endless procession of semis came from the east, unloaded, and left to the west. Hundreds of workers unloaded donated clothes from the trailers onto a veritable mountain of pre-owned, pre-washed, pre-folded fabric. It seemed to be fifty feet high and growing rapidly.
Whooping with delight, the entire family raced up the nearest side of the mountain, dancing with delight and trying on everything in sight. But within minutes they stopped and ran sobbing and scratching back to the ground.
It was all polyester.
None of it even fit.
In the end, it made no difference. The IRS showed up, over-valued the clothes, figured the tax owed, re-valued the clothes correctly, determined the second amount was exactly the tax owed on the first valuation, and hauled them off to the last sock. A few weeks later, long after life had returned to normal (except for the oldest child, Jo, who still itched from the polyester) and the media had lost interest, a pair of jeans and a tee shirt showed up in the mail from the IRS- a slight refund.
That night the family threw a party. Tom announced that since they now had two sets of clothes between them, he no longer felt the need to spend his entire paycheck on the lottery, hoping to hit the jackpot and buy his entire family a Gucci wardrobe. To celebrate, they went out the next day and bought a six foot plasma TV.