With Apologies to Maslow

Its early morning here in the Sonoran desert and I am thinking about getting ready for work. I am going to try to have a more positive outlook on things today. We will see how that works out. This being ticked off is just too much trouble. More later. Well, its noon and I stopped home for a few minutes. The ordeal at work is making slow progress. My coworker now has someone working on the problem but there is no chance that the work will be completed in time to meet our customer's deadline. The boss confuses his inaction with sound management, but at least today I don't have to drag the unwilling. Fast forward 5 hours. She's a beauty, Clark. On the way home this beast pulled up along side me in traffic. The picture doesn't do it justice, so I'll describe it. The bus is lavender, with a white top. The owners opted for the wood stove accessory pack, including chimney. Want to bet woman driving this thing isn't whining about her crappy job. I'll bet she told someone to shove it in about 1976 and has been on the road ever since, at least the road to doing what she darn well pleases. Which, by the way, I hear is a lovely stretch of highway. Somethings just scream Get some perspective! at a guy, if he takes note. Do I ever learn? Hell no. On the subject of perspective, you may recall that I walk to the WalMart next door to my office twice a day. Once for coffee and later to get a sandwich at the Subway. There is a worker at WalMart who is 27 year-old and has seven kids ,including two sets of twins. They are all under the age of 10. She has to get this brood dressed and fed in the morning and get them to her mom's, so that Mom can babysit them and make sure that the older ones get to school on time. And she has to do all of this and be at work by six in the morning. Did I mention that she doesn't have a car, so it is all done on the bus? I don't know exactly what she earns, but I do know generally. Its approximately not too much. Her life is hard. In contrast, I live the life of a king, albeit a modest one. So here's a theory to explain my incessant bellyaching. Abraham Maslow came up with the concept of the hierarchy of needs. In a nutshell Maslow theorized that it is difficult to get in touch with your inner self if you are living under a bridge and eating out of a dumpster, or something close to that. But, if your survival needs are met or mostly met, you are free to discover you, which in some cases is not such a great discovery. So with apologies to Maslow for mucking up his theory, I give you Merle Sneed's Hierarchy of Screeds. My theory is that as our needs are met we whine and complain about less and less important things. Or at least I do, in which case my idea is not a theory, but rather an excuse. Take the lady from WalMart. She has to complain about the crappy landlord, the cost of basics, whether the kids get up on time, whether the bus is late, the creepy management at Walmart, you get the idea. Poor 401K performance? Not so much. Donald Trump on the other hand, bitches about whether his driver missed a small spot of champagne when he cleaned the limo or whether he only made a zillon bucks on a deal when he thought he would earn a bazillion. Bus late? Not a real problem at the Trump house. So that's it, Merle's Sneed's Hierarchy of Screeds and I am somewhere just above the middle crying about crap that just doesn't matter. Oh, my computer broke. Oh, I hate my job. What a load. Intellectually I know that I have it pretty easy in life, but emotionally it is a different matter. Why doesn't someone just dope slap me and tell me to stop my damn whining? Merle Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong and sometimes just full of it. Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor