![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waving across a values gulf
Jul. 5th, 2006 09:03 pmThis afternoon in the lab, one of my colleagues found something interesting in a back cabinet, where it had been forgotten for a few years. The last few times the lab was moved or rearranged, or even cleaned up in a significant way, someone decided it was worth keeping. Or that it wasn't taking up that much space. (Or that it looked like something so-and-so might be able to use, when he got back in town, so better keep it around to show him....) Anyhow, in the early days of the company, one of the board members, who was married to the CEO, contributed a pressure cooker to the lab. The people working in the lab at the time thought it might be useful for experiments that turned out not to go anywhere productive.
So, years later, an engineer finds the old pressure cooker in the lab cabinet and tells me the story, laughing. One executive gives a pressure cooker as a wedding present to a couple of other executives. Isn't that silly? Who even knows what a pressure cooker is? (I pointed out that they had been reasonably common when I was a little kid, and the married couple under discussion were a few years older, and thus presumably more familiar with them. I did not point out that the engineer telling me the story was in his mid-forties, and so I expected him to be familiar with common household gadgets of the 1970s, himself.)
Still, his main point was not that a pressure cooker was so intrinsically weird, but that this rich executive was giving cooking equipment as a wedding present to these other rich executives. None of them cook! (I interrupted to ask, "How do you know they don't cook? Maybe they like to cook.) He said, "They have millions of dollars, maybe billions! Of course they don't cook. Don't be silly! If I came into that kind of money, I'd never cook anything again. Be honest, would you?"
Being honest, if I inherited a billion dollars, I'd never drive a car again. I'd never iron another shirt. But I'd probably go on cooking a couple of times a week. (And I'd still eat a cold supper when it's hot and humid like this.)
So, years later, an engineer finds the old pressure cooker in the lab cabinet and tells me the story, laughing. One executive gives a pressure cooker as a wedding present to a couple of other executives. Isn't that silly? Who even knows what a pressure cooker is? (I pointed out that they had been reasonably common when I was a little kid, and the married couple under discussion were a few years older, and thus presumably more familiar with them. I did not point out that the engineer telling me the story was in his mid-forties, and so I expected him to be familiar with common household gadgets of the 1970s, himself.)
Still, his main point was not that a pressure cooker was so intrinsically weird, but that this rich executive was giving cooking equipment as a wedding present to these other rich executives. None of them cook! (I interrupted to ask, "How do you know they don't cook? Maybe they like to cook.) He said, "They have millions of dollars, maybe billions! Of course they don't cook. Don't be silly! If I came into that kind of money, I'd never cook anything again. Be honest, would you?"
Being honest, if I inherited a billion dollars, I'd never drive a car again. I'd never iron another shirt. But I'd probably go on cooking a couple of times a week. (And I'd still eat a cold supper when it's hot and humid like this.)
