May be an incident where they could not understand how much things they take for granted cost to the normies, a flagrant disregard for morals or ethics, a blatant show of arrogance or disconnectedness, or anything yould like to share.
When I was in my mid 30s driving back from Florida after closing out my dead mom’s apartment and so forth, I picked up a hitchhiker.
He was a rich person parasite kind of. He would work as a bartender where daughters of wealthy families partied. He charmed them and became their boyfriend, and that’s how he survived. He was smart and industrious with clever business ideas so he charmed the daughter’s dads as well kind of. When he was tired of grifting them he just disappeared. I picked him up at the start of his latest disappearance.
So anyway, yeah, during a 10 drive he clued me in to how wealthy people are offered services regular folks don’t even conceive of.
Care to elaborate on what those services are?
Going to Russia paid by the KGB to get water sports documented to be blackmailed later, all in exchange for some licenses and a few rubles.
Newly admitted psych patient who was seriously invested in getting their personal sheets out of the belongings that came in with them. I didn’t really get it but I don’t understand like half the things that supposedly make people happy so whatever. I go to inventory the belongings real quick so I can get their sheets before they go to sleep.
So it turns out the family sent them with a full set of queen size silk sheets. We had to wrap the fitted sheet around the mattress and then some to get it to fit. Also in the bag were several (understatement) brand new brand name electronic devices. The clothes were also brand new and when I had the secretary look them up and there were several items that each could have paid my rent.
I had no idea what to do with all of it. Most of the clothes and the sheets were fine for the patient to have, but we don’t allow electronics out on the unit. We have a safe for valuables like phones and wallets and stuff but it was only a little bigger than a microwave and this person’s valuables would have filled it several times over.
It was like a real-life version of that scene from spaceballs where they find out they’ve been lugging the princess’s hair dryer across the desert. Not the indignant yelling obviously but just the first part where they open it up and just need to comprehend what’s going on for a second. It was especially jarring considering that most of my patient population is homeless. So like they’ll bring in everything they own (they don’t really have anywhere to leave it) but even when it doesn’t fit well in our storage it’s not usually 20 pounds of luxury goods that I have to figure out where to safely put before I’m on the hook for whatever the fuck all that cost.
Best part about the whole thing was that the chief complaint was capgras delusions. This family set this person up with all of this stuff to send them to the hospital and the pt literally thought they were all fakes. Like literally fake aliens or clones or whatever. Like damn that was some irony.
There was this new kid at (public) middle school we kinda started feeling sorry for. He was always dressed nice. Had an excuse for PE. Had a special lunch from the cafeteria because of dietary needs. Turns out his parents were super specialized doctors or surgeons or something. After a couple of months he said he could have one of person over at a time after school. I went over first on my skateboard. He had one that he didn’t know how to ride, so he walked. We get to his house and they have this amazing view of the water and mountains. A fucking indoor pool and jacuzzi. Green house in the middle of the entryway with tropical plants. The mom greeted us and makes us leave our skateboards outside, take off our shoes, and told us the house rules. She asked me what my parents did and was just kind of deadeyes when I told her (boring, middle class work). We went to his room that had a goddamn computer in, most households didn’t have anything like that at the time. He had his own private phone line, cable tv, and tons of plastic model cars and planes. He had an RC Car. I was blown away and then he shows me their entertainment room with a giant projector tv, air hockey, a film projector and screen, and a bunch of other shit I can’t remember. I feel like I spent about an hour there before the mom found us and sent me home because they were having dinner? Gee thanks lady, I guess you don’t want the poors coming back for free food. Or your son to have any friends. My other friends went over there (one at a time!) with the same results. Looking back, I guess his parents were trying to research what other kid’s parents might be wealthy enough for their son to hang out with. or maybe for them to entertain/socialize. It was pretty gross.
Now that I think about it, I had a “friend” like that. He wasn’t super wealthy, but when most of us were broke ass people living in apartments with one TV in the house, he had this nice modern house with a pool, gated driveway, and a housekeeper who would pick him up from school and walk him home.
My mom was kinda friends with the housekeeper, since we’d walk the same route home as they were picking us up from school, and that’s how I became acquainted with him.
I remember going to his house once and we played his turbo grafx in his room for a bit… well more like he played and let me watch. He seemed pretty disinterested with it. I never got invited back or anything.
omg, the rich kid letting you watch…ugh, been there. that kid at my school had the nicest skate board you could buy and never once road it. Meanwhile we were mowing lawns to buy plywood for ramps, smoking weed, and chasing girls. I wouldn’t have traded his isolated life for mine, but I doubt he ended up going through the tough times me and my friends did. Tough times don’t build character, IMO, they just increase resentment towards the system.
the culture of the wealth gap (or intentional moat) has always been there, embedded in our everyday lives from birth to death. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires indeed.
well more like he played and let me watch. He seemed pretty disinterested with it.
Was he more excited about his cup-and-ball?
Sounds like it was a thing with the parents. What was your friend like?
Working retail in highschool in an area that is fairly low income but also intersects an area famous for celebrity vacation homes. The rich families would buy $1000 iPads for spoiled brats without any kind of breakage protection (after screaming at the retail workers for the screen not being indestructible, of course). The poor families always spent extra for protection because they valued their devices and couldn’t easily afford another one.
If the poor families are buying $1000 iPads then I don’t think they’re that poor
I bet they have microwaves too!
Luxury computing devices are the same as basic cooking tools, you’re right!
A tablet is not a luxury device.
The poster also does not say that poor people buy the high end tablets but rather that when they do buy devices they opt for insurance.
Rich people see a tablet as a disposable item that they can afford to replace.
Poor people see a tablet as an investment that must be protected.
Fair point, I read OP’s comment as saying everyone in this shop is buying the ludicrously expensive models, re-reading it’s not clear if that’s what they actually meant
When I was paid to fly to the company owner’s summer home with a new computer so the owner could remote into the office from his summer home.
I was given a months pay for two days of work, the owner just wanted the computer working when he got to his summer home.
So yeah, that was when I saw someone just throwing money at a problem untill it went away.
Heh. He probably used it a total of a week too.
He used it for a few years, but then it was replaced again
I was in a contemporary fine art market and I just hear visitors mentioning about owning a hotel in such a casual way, like how one would talk about owning a car.
The first security job I ever worked was for a rich girl’s 21st birthday party at her house, my main duty was making sure nobody went to the stables and bothered the racehorses. I heard one of the kids say that her dad owned 2 Toyotas & her mum owned a Subaru, and I thought maybe they’re not so different from me after all because my parents have the same cars. Turns out she was talking about owning the car dealerships.
Pffffffff
If I was drinking water I’d need to shower now
One of the kids in elementary school is very kind giving away paper when the teacher does surprise quizzes. May fortune always bless that person’s soul.
On the opposite end, there’s a lot of kids that play with their food/ snacks and chuck it around other kids and they consider that fun. My kid brain couldn’t get it that time, all I thought was it is sacrilege to food and I can’t do it because it’s already hard to get by with enough food to eat.
All of it clicked in 4rth or 5th grade when you start to see more, sometimes subtle, variations of these privileges happening all around.
A very rich friend of mine decided that they wanted to “take time off” and travel the world. She called her travel agent (10 pm on a Saturday) and got them to build a world trip by Monday afternoon. That Friday she got on a plane and just left for 9 months of travel. There was never a sense of this being a big deal or extravagant but more of a quirky whim.
It was then that it occurred to me that while we live on the same planet we don’t live in the same world.
It’s this kind of shit that people don’t realize the ultra rich can do. They literally buy more time to live their lives.
They don’t have to shop, cook, clean, do housework, do laundry, book tickets, plan travel, or even manage their own finances.
They pay people to do all of that for them, gaining them more of their lives to enjoy.
The rest of us have to put up with getting like 30% of our lives to ourselves.
When I briefly dated a rich woman. She would drop hundreds of dollars on a whim and knew somebody at every club and restaurant to get us to the front of the line, the best seats, etc. It was like watching someone live in a dream world where they could get almost anything they wanted instantly. Sometimes I miss that feeling before remembering the full not so great reality of it, though
Sometimes I miss that feeling before remembering the full not so great reality of it, though
Tell us!
Nothing particularly interesting. She was just a very possessive person and I’m pretty independent. So I tried really hard to make it work because honestly I wanted a sugar mama to support me through college. But we just weren’t compatible :(
they’re monsters. every single one of them. not even sophisticated; there’s no substance to them.
I was working in a restaurant and one day a regular invited us to his place for after work drinks. He opened the front door into a monumental hallway with beautiful winding stairs and a large mosaic monogram with his initials on the floor.
We went into the main living area with a professionally decked out open kitchen, a 20 person dining table and a seating area with 4 large Chesterfields. The whole room is filled with art and antiques.
He asked me if I wanted to pick a few bottles of wine because of my good taste ( I’m a trained sommelier). He then guided me to his library and opened a secret door that led into the wine cellar.
Every large winehouse in the world was represented and he insisted on picking whatever I wanted. The sheer amount of stacks of Mouton Rotschild premier Cru, Tenuta Dan Guido - Sassicaia… We opened 4 bottles that would’ve cost about 10.000 euros together. No sweat.
He told us that despite the nice kitchen he never cooks. He goes to restaurants every day and on the weekends he hires top chefs to cook for his guests.
Then he asked us if we would like to go and have lunch in Milan, the next day (I’m from Belgium). He chartered a heli and had extra space for 3 persons.
He’s a modest guy. Rides his bike everywhere and makes his money selling real estate. He only sells high value property like castles and works one day a week. He’s not extremely talented but admitted he’s just lucky.
I realized that to become rich, you need money. Whether it’s your own or someone else’s doesn’t matter, you just need a lot.
When I was in the second grade, I went to a classmates birthday party that they invited only some of the other kids in my class and I was lucky to go. Growing up we were pretty poor but still happy, so I was dressed in old good will clothes. After the party, I overheard the mom tell my dad don’t bring me around anymore because we weren’t in the same financial class as them.
I can only assume that was difficult to process as a kid.
It was when trumps one daughter told the story about how her dad was explaining to her as they walked from the limo to the hotel or the reverse that the homeless guy begging was wealthier than them because he had so much debt.
In fifth grade at a private school in Florida, I told a kid our Apple IIe didn’t have a joystick.
A few months later he was flabbergasted I didn’t have one already.
I hadn’t even asked my parents for one. It wasn’t enough of a priority for me. (When I did get one a few years later it was with my money.)
We had a computer at home and were definitely not poor. But I stood out as the relatively poor kid there.
At the time, the “Supermarket Scanner” story painted a picture that, while blown out of proportion, is a truth about the way some people interact with the world when they have money and power. They don’t see the same things that I do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarket_scanner_moment
I don’t remember when I learned they were different, I didn’t give them much thought, but this podcast was incredibly eye opening. Not just learning that rich people were in a different world, but the scale of that difference:
The blurb quote is good:
The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it’s almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.
But one story illustrated it amazingly. Basically she talks about going with some family to some island that was in another country, and the whole way they saw no customs agents whatsoever. They just drove onto the tarmac at an airport, got on a private plane, flew to another country and went about their day, and at no point did the subject of passports even come up. They just violated international borders and it was a regular tuesday to them.
And also just the existence of the general purpose assistants was amazing. These are people who are paid to do whatever it takes to make these rich people happy, and they routinely break the law on their behalf, and it’s never mentioned. The clients have total deniability as well as the ability to get just about anything they want.
The job could be, “help me figure out where my wallet went” (from overseas when it’s 3am for the assistant) or “help me show my friends a good time” (without mention of any laws). There’s a whole industry of enablers that are paid not to say no or tell them there’s anything they can’t have.
I have to admit, my exposure is limited to the ones who try to.influence the situation based on their position and title. Never met the likes of what you described. That was both fascinating and morbid at the same time.
“This is America” episode 3(?) When he’s receiving a hand job whilst discussing buying a boat to smuggle people. Perfect example.
yeah I’m okay with those people getting the wall if they don’t turn.
