The textbook for my 8th Grade Spanish class included a short story about a child who is brought along with his mother when she visits a friend's house. The friend has a jar of candy, which, naturally, claims a piece of the child's attention. The friend gives the child permission to help himself to a handful of candy, but the child demurs, despite repeated offers. Finally, the friend dips her hand into the candy jar and gives the child a handful of candy, praising him for his politeness and restraint. "No Ma'am," thinks the child, "Rather, your hand is larger than mine."
That memory surfaced today as I took shameless advantage of the perk of remote access to my work desktop. Our neighbors have two sons, and they have both pretty well versed in the art of clearing a driveway of snow. The eldest does the rough, heavy work of chunking snow off to the side, and the youngest has the more painstaking job of exposing the asphalt. Not a bad system, all in all.
They were finishing up their own driveway when I hailed the oldest and weirded him out a bit by asking whether he and his brother wanted to make a few bucks by clearing ours by the time my husband (not similarly blessed with remote access) rolled back home from work. But when I asked what fee would be worth their time and trouble, I was met with a shrug. So--not knowing the going rate for driveway shoveling any more than I'd know the going rate for babysitting--I ended up naming the price. I strongly suspect that I dished out a double-handful of candy in the process.
Oh, well. I can easily rationalize it in the name of stimulating the local economy. And--to their credit--the guyzos did a far more thorough job than I would have done myself--even if I weren't buried in regular and extracurricular work just now. So really I was just outsourcing...yeah, that's it... [insert self-deprecating eyeroll]
Yet it drilled home (for me) the lesson that the grease on the wheels of capitalism is not, in fact, money. It's information.
