Fairy Ann, Wheeler-Dealer

My mom is a wheeler-dealer. Put her on the phone with a salesman, and she'll get the best deal they've ever given anyone. Throw a stack of coupons and an office-supply catalog at her feet and the doorbell will ring 20 minutes later with a guy delivering your free paper and a bonus box of kittens.

I share none of my mom's special abilities. It embarrasses me to use a coupon anywhere but at the grocery and even then, I sometimes feel bad holding up the line with my fist-fulls of money savers. This is why, now that she lives with us, Mom does all the negotiating. Just today, she battered the woman from Scott's into some sort of crazy discount by threatening to go back to TruGreen. And she got the TruGreen lady to give up some serious ground herself, by threatening to go with Scott's.

It's an art, really. She sits down at the phone with her legal pad at the ready and her loins girded, cracks her knuckles and goes to work. Twenty minutes later, the Schwan's man is paying her to take his food.

Now this can go the other way, too. Lots of people have made money off my mother by sending her coupons. DSW, for one, can send every employee to college off the interest on Mom's "Special Birthday Discount" coupon purchases alone. Tony has razor blades to last until his beard stops growing. We have enough Tylenol to stock a hospital. And her car smells like freshly-baked sugar cookies because the Manager's Special at the car wash wasn't a good enough deal alone - it needed the additional air freshener and chassis wax. (Come to think of it, we could all use a good chassis wax.)

So the next time you click a coupon link in your email or accept the senior citizen parent of a military service member discount at the movie theater, think of my mom. She's probably in line behind you, waiting to combine her offers to get in for free.