Atlanta Perks

In Atlanta I get upgraded to a full size Dodge Charger, because I am a member of National’s Emerald Club. I quickly learn that it has a lot more power than my little Carolla and takes more effort to keep in the lane because of the size and power difference.

When I travel I try to do things that I can not do at home. I arrived late and started seeking out Vietnamese food, that is something that Cincy really does not have. The GPS was able to find a restaurant but it doesn’t know if it is open or not. Since it is 9PM on Sunday Lunar New Year’s Eve the restaurant was closed. There is a Latino pool hall next door and I end up having an authentic Mexican sandwich for Lunar New Year’s Eve dinner. I arrive at the Factory at 10:30 PM and wander around the parking lot in the dark. Both security shacks are vacant so I end up calling into the factory to get someone to let me in, thank goodness for cell phones and good planning on my part. The boilers are not functioning properly so I setup a mobile office and do computer work while I am waiting. As the it hits midnight, the turn of the new year all the e-mail messages are shifted from the “today” box to the “last week” box. It is strange to be cranking away and everything you have been working on for the past hour happened “last week” because it became Monday. At about 3 AM I give up and decide that the boilers are not going to work anytime soon so I go to the hotel to sleep. At 6 AM I receive a call and let it go into voicemail as I slowly roll toward the other side of the room. The voicemail says that the boilers and they expect me to be at the factory at 6:30. I smirk because it is a 15-minute drive into the factory and I have to get checked out and dress in 15 minutes. When I arrive at the factory I am told that I get to wait for our product to make it to the front of the queue. At about 10 AM we get started. I am glad that they expected me there at 6:30, surely I would have gotten sluggish if I didn’t have that 3.5 hours to get warmed up to help them with the new product. This may be a bit extreme for the people reading from outside the industry. Unfortunately this happens very often, in all of the various organizations I have worked for\with. The one redeeming thing is that my presence there made a difference.

I leave the factory to go to another hotel that is much closer to the airport so that I don’t have to get up as early in the morning. At the front desk they give me a cookie and a box of chocolates because I am a Hilton Honors member. Thing is I didn’t even realize that Doubletree was part of Hilton, but who was I to argue with a warm cookie and chocolates. My room is by the elevator and I get a knock on the door with someone saying it is room service. I tell them through the door that I didn’t order room service and they say that they have a gift for me. In my younger day I would have opened the door, before hearing another traveler’s tale. I heard a story where the guest was stabbed; robbed and bound by an intruder that forced his way in when the door was opened. So I looked through the peephole, which does not give enough visibility to really tell anything other than that it was a black dude that was probably bigger than I was. I asked him to leave it outside the door. As I watched him leave and heard him knock on the next door saying “Room service!” I unbolted my door and stopped. My sense of caution said that it could still be a rouse he could just be pretending to have gone away and awaiting the door to open. So I called the front desk and asked them if they had anyone delivering “gifts” to guests under the call of “room service”. The front desk knows nothing about it and the manager comes up to investigate. The delivery person sounds like he is a few doors down now so I crack the door grab the bag. It turns out to be a tin with Doubletree cookies. The note inside says it is a thank you for being a Hilton Honors member. How about that a box of chocolates, a cookie at check in and a tin of cookies delivered to your room just for being a Hilton Honors member? I think they could have not freaked out the guests by either giving the tin of cookies at the front desk or giving us warning that someone was coming.

I go and sleep for a couple hours awaken by call from California from a person who keeps a bit of an unusual schedule. I look on the internet and find a place to go swing dancing that night and then leave the hotel in search of some Vietnamese food for Lunar New Year’s day. Again after a half-hour of driving I show up to another restaurant that is closed next to another pool hall. So no Asian food for me New Year’s Eve or Day. When I make it out to the Swing dance I realize that I am far too tired to really even be interesting in expending the energy to dance with the ladies.

Standard of living

A key point of fiscal management is living beneath one’s means. Thus having a cushion for emergencies, investments and savings. I think my ability to do this exceptionally well stemmed from being an immigrant that had two extremely hard working parents. They worked multiple jobs simultaneously and were able to do things for four hungry kids that I would never have been able to do nearly as well. Seeing them work 16 hours a days so that we could eat made helped me understand why I could not have a lot of things that I wanted as a child. I think that cleaning other people’s houses for money at the age of 6 also helped me with this appreciation. As I got slightly older into my mid elementary school years I stopped asking for things because usually the answer was no and I understood why. It was simpler to not desire things I did not need.

My good friend in college called me the king of owning nothing. I left college with 8 boxes that I shipped and a carload of stuff. In retrospect many of those boxes were books from college that I probably did not need. When I left St. Louis I had 2000 # of stuff in my one bedroom apartment. The mover asked if I was a bachelor, I asked if it was that obvious. He said that the average one bedroom apartment has 5000# of stuff. I left my 3 bedroom house in California with 2500# of stuff. Now I have a chainsaw and other interesting lawn tools, saws and other stuff that I have very little use for in a townhouse. Alas, I am amassing more and more junk.

In California my ex-girlfriend had bought me 2 folding chairs with cushions because she thought I was too Spartan (though she did not say so). Apparently the uncushioned folding chairs I had were not good enough.

I know used to I have a very high tolerance for not having comforts or pretty things. These are things that many would consider necessities, the same people may never have lived a Spartan lifestyle though. My life seems to be transitioning to one that requires more…luxuries. As I travel more and more of the world I have seen a lot of hostels with a vast range of lack of amenities. The ones that are heavily lacking bother me much more than they used to.

When I got to Cincinnati I lived in a very bad part of town in a dump for a few weeks. I was forced into this situation because I was waiting on a real estate deal and did not want to pay $2000 a month for temporary housing, this was one of the few places that would allow me to go month to month. I cut and ran before the month was over accepting the loss as sunk costs. The bathroom with the ceiling falling on me while I was in the shower and the banging pipes that woke me up every night were too much for even me to deal with.

This weekend I bought a $40 leather chair and I really like it. A few years ago I would not have done this unless a girlfriend asked me to. A few years ago my butt would not have gotten stiff from sitting on the cushioned folding chair. I started wondering what has brought about these changes. Am I getting soft? Perhaps I am just getting old.