No where to go
What now?
Lord only knows.
Maybe I’ll start a hot dog stand along the highway somewhere and hang my diploma on it.
That’s about all it’s worth these days, though I had high hopes in college.
Money wasn’t so much the thing that intrigued me as how it flowed from one set of hands to another.
I saw it as a regular art or science, and if you knew how to make it go in any one direction, the world was yours.
People thought I was crazy because I didn’t love money itself, asking me why I bothered studying business if I didn’t want to become rich.
Everybody I knew wanted to grab the cash, and didn’t see how cash had a way of flowing out of their pockets as easily as it flowed in.
Even when people bought cars or houses with swimming pools, the money didn’t stay around, flowing out in a host of small ways such as repairs and depreciation.
Even my professors at school didn’t completely understand me.
Perhaps they were too caught up in the politics of economics.
It wasn’t so much a science to them as a religion.
And for these professors, it was more important to get people to believe in greed as a way of life than to get them to understand how it worked or to appreciate the beauty of its movement.
My love of these aspects prompted in the most practical of my professors to claim I would never make a go of it in the real world.
Graduation seemed to belie this.
My marks were very high. So when I looked for work, I was grabbed up, given good wages and I was highly regarded for a while as any of my more ambitious classmates.
But when it came down to the ill, when I had to make a chose between people and money, I tended to fall on the side of human beings, understanding the dynamic part in which they played in the flow of money.
It was their needs and wants that made the system work, and without them, money tended to stagnate, catching up in rich people’s bank accounts the way gold and jewelry did in a dragon’s horde.
This idea of human importance didn’t sit well with my employers.
Nor did they truly understand me or my talents.
Without greed, I seemed somehow perverted to them, someone to be distrusted.
So I wandered from job to job with each taking me farther from my education and skill.
Oh, every job took me into management willingly enough, but I became more of a babysitting than a money man, locked into a system of business which my bosses controlled.
But even there, on the most fringe, people wanted me to have a killer instinct.
It wasn’t enough to work, one had to destroy the competition as if a deadly enemy. We were supposed to squeeze out every ounce of potential from our employees without giving back as much as we took as if they were merely oranges, devoid of everything but their skins when we were done.
My discovering a small warehouse in New Jersey came by accident, a place less engendered with greed, with the main office thousands of miles away on another coast, who thought this small place merely an outpost for distribution, a cheap place to ship from.
No one looked over my shoulder or told me not to become friendly with the help.
Good things, however, never last.
Eventually the main office noticed.
Part of it was the result of my approving higher wages for the workers I believed did a good job.
Part of it was the way I defended their work, tracing blame for corporate mistakes to the main office, not our small island of sanity in New Jersey.
The memos told me I should avoid being so friendly with the help.
When I responded by saying our production was better than production in the slave factories they over saw, the main office closed us down, leaving aching for something that isn’t so corporate or so greedy, in other words, leaving me nowhere to go.
Unless, of course, I want that hot dog stand on the highway.