The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was chatting it up with my UPS driver a few years back.  He had a shack like mine, burned wood for heat, lived in a remote spot up in the hills east of Stanwoodopolis.  I asked him how he liked driving for a living and he said, well, it’s okay if you don’t mind only making wages.

I said what does that mean?  And he took some precious minutes from his frenetic schedule to explain he delivered to all the dot.com millionaires up the road, boyz who retired at 40, cashed in their stock options and lived like shahs in their palaces on the bluff while he was making mere union wages.  You know, with health insurance, vacation and pension.  Stuff me and my pals don’t get….

Wealth, I guess you already know in the land of the free, is relative.  All these folks with early retirements, McMansions, dot.com money, his and her BMW’s — well, it can sure make a decent salary with benefits look like pauper’s wages if you care to do a comparison test.  Make you feel positively deprived.  Make you think if your time isn’t worth $500 an hour you’re being cheated, sorta like being homeless at Christmas in Beverly Hills.  Probably explains why folks play the Lottery.  Even up their playing field if they hit big.

We spend too much time wanting what we don’t have than enjoying what we do — and that maxim that money won’t buy you happiness, well, save that for the simple minded.  Money for most of us will BE happiness.

My UPS driver left awhile back.  Maybe a new route.  Hopefully one delivering to minimum wage earners.  My guess is he’s starting up some new software company, fishing for venture capital, looking for investors.  Probably in a couple of years he’ll sell out to IBM or AT&T, retire near me with enough money to buy the bluffs across the street and build a Taj South Hall.   UPS trucks’ll line up at the coded gate and he’ll regale the drivers with stories of when years ago, in another lifetime, he drove big brown trucks and worked for slave wages.  Won’t be long, we won’t have enough folks left to drive delivery.