Queenstown, not in Jamaica

Working in down San Francisco, I would ride the bus to work. There were just so many offices and so many people streaming around at all times of the day. Going to and from the office, getting a coffee, chatting on the streetcorner. Whatever. I'd look at all the buildings and wonder: what possibly goes on in all of these offices? Then, I realized that my job was to basically talk to our customers and make sure the product we were building was going to make the maximum percentage of the people in the world (with money of course) happy with it. All this in a piece of software that like %0.001 of the human population knows about.

Looking at my little slice of the world, it became clear how much everyone is just a little part of the whole machine and how much I am in awe of it. Take something as simple as coffee. There's some person whose job is it to formulate the cream that goes in that coffee. There's another company that sells that guy the software he needs to figure out that recipe. That company needs to buy power, so it buys it from the power company. The power company has a guy whose job it is to determine how much power is required by that grid that the software company is on. And so on and so on. It's kind of beautiful in a way, like a gigantic Swiss watch that just happens because of capitalism (and greed).

Of course, there's some people whose role in the machine is not so typical. They're not "cogs" like the typical Joe slugging it out day to day formulating coffee creamer recipes. Instead, these people could be called the Leisure Class (or just the Rich). As normal as you or I, except they Own rather than Do. Their "Do" consists of managing what they own. We met one of these folks today while watching the Super Bowl. Shandelle made some friends at the sports bar before I arrived and it turned out that one of these guys were the son of leisure class individual, his hired guide around Queenstown, and an Irishman who worked on his Dad's yacht. Very nice people, though it's clear that the world in which they exist is completely foreign to the normal person. You want to drop everything and fly to New Zealand? Done. Hanggliding at 10 minutes notice? Done. In a world where money is little or no object, you just do.

But, what's also interesting about this trip is how easy it is to be happy with so little. We're travelling cheaply, living in hostels, and doing just fine. Our current hostel room, in fact, has a better view than some of the high-end hotels around here (yes, we go lucky). I look back and wonder: do I really need all that crap sitting in storage back in California? Sadly, I do because it's not fun to watch TV sitting on the floor and we won't be travelling forever.