… well, okay, I probably am.  But I’m really trying not to judge.  Especially since the thing I’m being judgy about directly benefits me.  So take this post with as much salt as you feel necessary.  I probably shouldn’t even be writing it.

(He said, before continuing to write.)

This was a slow week at work.  I was closing about the same number of sales as anyone else, but for whatever reason it seemed like most of my sales ended up for low-dollar items and not anything really worth writing home about.  When I make 5% commission on sales I can’t get too excited about selling a $200 bed to somebody, right?  And the couple of bigger opportunities I had this week I wasn’t able to close for one reason or another.  I walked into work today needing a great day in order to end up with an average week.

And, well, I got it, ending the day with a sale that ended up being damn near seven thousand dollars after taxes and delivery– my current high-water mark for a single sale.  It was a mother and daughter, a random walk-in off the street, and they were setting up her new apartment for when she starts college. She literally got new stuff for every room of the house; a living room set, a bedroom set, a dining table and chairs, some chairs for the bar, the works.  And then as I’m going over everything with them to make sure I didn’t miss anything, Mom says “Oh, did we buy you a desk?”  And we hadn’t, so we went and looked at desks.

And this 19-year-old kid picks out a thousand dollar executive desk.  And for some reason that  was the detail that had me questioning the sanity of the entire endeavor.  You know this kid’s gonna move, like, five times in the next eight years, right?  Do you really want to be dropping this kind of cash on a houseful of Grown Person Shit so that she and her friends can fornicate and puke on it for the next four years?  How many times do you want to move that heavy-assed executive desk?  A king-size storage bed?  For a 19-year-old?

And then Mom drops $5000 in cash on my desk in front of me and writes a check for the remainder, and it hit me: I’m looking at this all wrong, because these people clearly have so much goddamn money that it doesn’t matter if she wrecks it.  She can leave that shit in the apartment and just move and they can afford to completely re-outfit her in her next place.  They’ve got money like that.  It doesn’t matter.

I suspect, what with Notre Dame starting back up in the next couple of weeks, that this is not going to be the last time I experience this.  And, as someone who just made something like $315 for like twenty minutes of not-very-hard work for these (it should be pointed out, very nice*) people, it’s not like I have a lot of room to complain.  But… damn.  Some of these folks just do not live like me, y’know?

(*) Mom, after the “do you need a desk?” moment, actually looked at me and apologized for “being such pains in the ass.”  I looked her straight in the eye and told her that at the amount she was spending I was willing to put up with about fifteen times as much pain in the ass before it became a problem, and I wasn’t kidding.