Interesting choice of words

Michigan is considering a bill that would make it harder (although not very hard) on people who own abandoned property and do nothing about it. Well and good and not especially fascinating except for this quote from Sen. Virgil Smith, D-Detroit, who introduced the bill:

"The banks have been proactive working with us. They don't want to sit on property. It hurts their bottom line."

I bet it does.

Many years ago, we took on a small data processing contract from the Girl Scouts. Basically a matter of doing the data entry and some cross-tabs for a member-satisfaction survey. Besides scalar responses, there was a lot of free text, and we read all of it in an effort to reduce it to something the Council could act on. One pair of questions was something like this: "Which activity do you like least?" and "Why?"

One of the younger respondents answered, "Sitting on the floor" and "Hurts my butt." Somehow, the quote above about the banks brought that to mind.