A couple of Saturdays ago I sat down at a 1/3 table where a guy, in his late 20's, from the Northern Hemisphere, was providing most of the chatter at the table. After a while a pattern emerged with his commentary. It appears that this fellow had gone to University and completed a degree that had very little to do with the work he was now undertaking. That is, working in the finance industry. And one of his big life regrets, at the age of 28 or so, was that he had, from his point of view, failed to realize when he was leaving school that a better option would have been to pursue an apprenticeship and become a carpenter, electrician, plumber or some other tradie type occupation. I have some sympathy for the view that many young people would be far better off pursuing a trade rather than taking on debt via the tertiary education system. Charles Hugh Smith has
blogged on the issue of student loans being a rort. And as I have an eighteen year old son and a twenty year old son, I have been concerned at the risks of my sons taking on large amounts of student debt with the possibility of a poor chance of being able to pay the loans back should their choices be poor.
So, at first, I was nodding my head and feeling some sympathy for this fellow. However, with the passage of time it became apparent that this fellow had this regret of his stuck on a repeat loop. And after he had started in again, on what was starting to sound very much like a deeply entrenched whinge, I chose to start asking him some open-ended questions in the hope of nudging the conversation away from his life regrets towards another area that might be less depressing/boring. Eventually we started to converse about what was the nature of his work in Melbourne. And it came out that he worked in the financial industry with an interest in trading the financial markets. Several other relevant pieces of information that surfaced were that:
- he, and others in the firm he worked for, worked many hours per week
- quite often he would sleep in the office
- and it would appear, that stimulatory drugs were used at times to help get through the work or stay awake at vital times
As the conversation went on my open-ended questions eventually moved towards more closed questions. And as I took this path with the questions related to drug use, this fellow became quite concerned and became concerned that I might be a cop. Several times, as he talked about his work/drug use he looked at me sideways and asked me "Are you a cop?". About ten or fifteen minutes after he first asked me whether I was a cop he lifted his stack and left the poker room.... His read of me as being a cop was wrong. And perhaps he is taking the wrong selection of drugs as his level of paranoia seems to be a little on the high side and prevented him from enjoying his recreational game of poker.
A couple of days ago I was reminded of this short episode in my life by another player from that table who ended up on the same table as me. He recognized me from that interaction and brought up the paranoid exit from the game by the player who thought I was a cop....
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