The other day at work I was working side by side with a new employee, when out of the blue he says: "Dude, are you really a vegetarian?" I could tell by the look on his face that he thought this was most unlikely, and assumed that some of my other employees were just trying to pull his leg. "Yes," was all I gave him, and we continued working.
I have been a vegetarian for seventeen years now, but invariably new employees ask me this question in this same manner. I think that it is some sort of initiation process for my other employees to share everything they know about me with the new guy. Should I be upset that my employees waste time sitting around talking about my eating habits? Time that I am paying them for no doubt. Should I be irate that a group of grown men are talking about me behind my back? None of my long time employees have ever opted to discuss my eating habits with me.
I'm sure it's great sport for them to discuss how bizarre I am. "Do you know he doesn't even watch TV?" Maybe I should just be glad that they've changed the subject from how Filthy Rich I am to how weird I am. I mean I know that they're going to talk about me, that's what people do.
Last summer I nearly had a union uprising on my hands when my wife and I bought a new car. One of my employees' clairvoyant wife decided somehow that she knew how much money we make, and all of the sudden everyone was up in arms demanding a pay increase. Things were touch and go there for about fifteen minutes.
Needless to say, no one got a pay increase over that nonsense, and all of the employees involved still work for me. I guess it's not too bad working for a hippie-tree-hugging-vegetarian weirdo after all.
Let them talk. I just hope that they keep working while they speculate about how many millions of dollars I have, or what kitten sacrificing cults I may be affiliated with. The truth is I don't care what people say or think about me, and I know that they say plenty.
I'm a vegetarian. I'm not a Christian. I think that watching TV is a waste of our most limited resource: time. I live in a nice house, that I worked hard to build. I love my family and I am not ashamed of my life. These things are all true.
Our finances are our business, but feel free to imagine that you know more than you really do. Most of our family and friends tend to think that we are way better off than we really are, and they don't mind saying so to our faces as well as behind our backs. The truth is, if we were as rich as a lot of you like to think, we'd be living in Hawaii right now, and I'd be writing books instead of pounding nails.
Go ahead, talk amongst yourselves.
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5 comments:
Kharma's a bitch dude.
As profound as that sentiment may be, I think that you have missed my point completely.
People talk about people or gossip if you will, and I don’t know you but I’m sure that you’re probably included in that generalization. Maybe some people don’t, but we all know that the vast majority of us do. Not something to be proud of, but not something to worry about either. That is my point, that whether you are telling a friend about something someone did at work, or telling your spouse about how a friend of yours offended you at lunch, everybody does it. Sometimes we need to get something off our chest, sometimes we just feel the need to pass on an interesting or amusing anecdote.
Should I over-react, round up all my employees and fire anyone who was talking about me behind my back. No, that would be ridiculous. I accept that it happened, that it will happen again, and move on. I actually almost forgot this particular instance immediately, it happened almost two weeks ago, but something else happened to remind me of it.
You would have to go to some extreme measures in this world to insulate yourself from people who are going to discuss you. What I was trying to say is that I’m not ashamed of who I am or what I do, and perhaps that helps me shrug these incidents off a little easier.
People are so brave when they are being anonymous. It's inspiring.
What I want to know is do you eat hot dogs? Cause I heard that lots of vegetarians don't consider the hot dog "meat".
I just noticed that you said if you were really a rich vegetarian you'd move to Hawaii. Really? Cause that's not where I pictured you. I was thinking somewhere with a dryer climate.
A dryer climate? You mean like New Mexico?
Hot Dogs. Mmmmmmm. Did you ever see The Great Outdoors? The racoons wouldn't even eat those things. "Lips and ...."
The Vegetarian equivelant to the hot dog would be eating apple cores and potato peals mashed to a pulp and rolled into cylinders. There is a good reason those parts are called "scraps."
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