Back in the 90’s, I was making ridiculous money in Silicon Valley, and hanging out with lots of fellow relatively-young people who were doing the same, for the first time in our lives (and, for some of us, the last time).
My bachelor party occurred just as this wealth was peaking (or, for me, had just peaked). We went out. We acted like complete fuckwits. Rather than do the tit-bar thing (I’d had enough of tit bars by then), we did the skatepunk-kid thing instead. We went to an afternoon punk concert. We went out for food and drinks afterwards. We were rude to waitstaff, got into a food fight at a yuppie bar (!), and made everything right just by waving money around. We stole posters (“souvenirs!”) from a BART train and got hassled by BART cops. It was pretty ridiculous. We were acting like 9th graders with six-figure incomes. We were quick to justify it: “We work hard, we’re at the forefront of the greatest creation of wealth in the history of the world, and we’re just blowing off steam!”
At random intervals during this event, my brother kept shaking his head with embarassment, and muttering “rich assholes”. Which, he perceived (probably correctly), is what everyone in the path of our group must have thought of us.
On the way home, we hit a quiet, mellow local dive bar filled mostly with working-class Mexican guys playing pool. We were loud and obnoxious. One of my friends bought a round for the house– loudly. My brother looked at me, “See? Drinks for aaaallll my friends! Rich assholes.” On the way home (in a low-income Hispanic neighborhood), one of the six-figure-income revelers dove headfirst into the neighbors’ carefully manicured shrubs, and another one grabbed a neighbor’s plastic garbage-can lid and sledded down the middle of the street in it.
“Rich assholes” is what I kept muttering to myself while reading this (read the whole page to get the full humiliating flavor of it):
The next day I e-mail Brickwork, one of the companies Friedman mentions in his book. Brickwork– based in Bangalore, India– offers “remote executive assistants,” mostly to financial firms and health-care companies that want data processed. I explain that I’d like to hire someone to help with Esquire-related tasks: doing research, formatting memos, like that. The company’s CEO, Vivek Kulkarni, responds, “It would be a great pleasure to be talking to a person of your stature.” Already I’m liking this. I’ve never had stature before. In America, I barely command respect from a Bennigan’s maitre d’, so it’s nice to know that in India I have stature.
No, you don’t have “stature”. Someone is sticking their tongue up your ass. And you’re not even embarassed about it. You should be. You are a rich asshole. No wonder the Bennigan’s waiter doesn’t respect you.
And, you’re taking advice from Thomas Friedman? What a douche bag.
