The editor-in-chief of the Ust-Ilimskaya Pravda newspaper, Anton Pavlovich Optimistov, loved to use the labor of the people around him. He loved him so much that, except for the taxi driver Uncle Fedya, no one wanted to be friends with Optimistov. One day, Optimistov called Uncle Fedya to his dacha to dig potatoes and quarreled with his only friend. The dacha was isolated in the forest, and no one wanted to take the Optimistov family away from it. And the editor-in-chief then decided that he would go to the city himself and save the family, but it turned out that he should have saved the family a long time ago and not at all by taxi, because Optimistov’s wife and daughter also did not want to be friends with him.