Jimmy was the king of Not-getting-around-to-things.

He didn’t mean anything by it, it was just the way he was. And no amount of nagging could make him change his ways.

He didn’t fix the hole in the toolshed roof until it grew bigger and bigger and eventually the whole roof collapsed.

He didn’t change the engine oil in the old station-wagon until the engine overheated and blew a gasket.

He didn’t replace the batteries in the smoke-alarm, and nobody was surprised when the house burnt down to cinders. 

His poor wife Josephine, who’d luckily been out of town that night, couldn’t rightly identify Jimmy’s body as he’d been so badly burnt. They had to go off his dental records. Not that Jimmy had gotten around to visiting his dentist in years.

There was a whole lot of wailing and moaning at Jimmy’s funeral, as everyone who knew him knew he was a good soul who just had no get-up-and-go.

Josephine cried louder and harder than everyone else, and had to be carried out before the coffin went into the ground.

Folks offered to help settle any of Jimmy’s affairs but Josephine begged to be left alone to get on with it, as making a few phone calls and signatures would help take her mind off things.

But despite her due diligence, by which I mean that she had literally pressed a pen into Jimmy’s hand and physically moved his fingers around the documentation, Josephine was shocked to learn that Jimmy’s life insurance policy was invalid, as he’d neglected to tell them that he was a smoker, a habit evidenced by his lit cigarette that had caused his death whilst he slept.

And the “Home and Contents” insurance firm, to whom Josephine had been making Jimmy mail regular cheques (by frogmarching him to the mailbox), had to reluctantly concede that they simply couldn’t pay out a penny, because technically, by not replacing his smoke-alarm battery, Jimmy had caused the accident himself.

Josephine was left destitute, and Jimmy’s family couldn’t help as every one of them was good and poor.

 So Josephine was all alone. She was sitting in the written-off old station-wagon outside the rubble of their house, wondering what to do, and rolling the good smoke-alarm batteries back-and-forth in her palm whilst she contemplated her fate, when, to her horror, a police car suddenly pulled up, with two gray-faced cops inside. 

In a panic, Josephine slammed those smoke-alarm batteries straight down her throat, before the cops could run up and stop her.

Both batteries leaked acid into her stomach, and she died that night in agony, but not before those gray-faced cops had told her the terrible truth.

It turned out that amidst the rubble of that burned-down house, police had found compelling evidence of a plot Jimmy had hatched to murder his “nagging wife” in a housefire, and make it look like an accident. He’d had everything in place, but he just hadn’t gotten around to doing it.