Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I admit it, I have had my dreams of being fantastically wealthy. Hey, I subscribe to the The Wall Street Journal and Forbes and their money-glamour lifestyle journals Forbes Life and WSJ. I even get the regional glitterati slicks St. Louis Magazine and 417. You know how you can tell a money-glamour lifestyle journal? Does it have any ads for watches or ads with strangely lit, underfed women in spotlit jewelry? Does it contain advertisements in the cheap ads in the back where an attractive blonde CEO of an executive matchmaking company wants to introduce you to quality underfed women who want spotlit jewelry? You know, I once even worked for a technology startup that gave me stock options, so I had a route to wealth. If only the startup had a route to selling software, I’d have been set.

That’s not worked out. I’m not complaining, mind you. Compared to the life I lived when I was growing up and the things my parents had at my age, I am wealthy. I’ve got a house (two, actually, but I’d be willing to part with one for the right price which is more and more becoming any price), I’ve got a technology company that’s keeping us cash flow neutralish (the house for sale has four bedrooms and a spare room in the basement that could almost be a fifth, and it’s within walking distance of shopping, dining, and arts—write for details!) But I’m not going to have my own private jet nor will I need to get a passport for sure to accommodate my world capital travel.

In the back of a recent Forbes, I saw an advertisement for an advisory service that asked the rich people if they really, really wanted to get really, really rich instead of just being rich. A handy table showed the differences between the megawealthy and the merely wealthy. For example, while the wealthy might have a pretty extensive network of the associates, the megawealthy had only a small network of very important people (no doubt including a paid advisor from the firm advertising). While the wealthy had a lot of stuff and did some things, the megawealthy only did things with the specific intent of increasing their wealth (no doubt including paying an advisor from the firm advertising). The table threw into stark relief why I, Brian J. Noggle, will never be super wealthy and why I might touch upon ultramoney for some time (after Saturday’s lottery numbers are drawn), but I will never challenge Larry Ellison for America’s Cup.

Here are the main reasons I will never be wealthy, and if I do happen into a lottery prize, why I won’t remain wealthy for long.

• I give a lot away. Every time I hit the Sam’s Club or Wal-mart, I pick thirty bucks’ worth of food or clothing for Crosslines. Whenever the YMCA has a barrel for children’s clothing or a tree for adopted families in it, I participate. I am Friends with 3 separate library systems, including one where I haven’t actually lived, and a number of other foundations and historical societies and whatnot. If I could, I would end up on the super membership levels of each. I think I’m Brewster or something, or maybe I just realize I have enough wealth to redistribute voluntarily.
• I would buy lots of land and buildings. The pasture and barn beside us went through foreclosure, and I talked to the man at the bank about picking it up. He asked me what I was going to do with it, and frankly, I just wanted it to have it. Maybe I would end up with some horses or cattle in it, maybe I would ask my nineteen-year-old equine-minded cousin with whom I’ve probably not shared a dozen words in my life to live in it and run a boarding stable, maybe I would just have twice-annual hay cuttings. The thing precedes the dream in some cases. I always look at buildings for sale in various regions the same way. What, a two story building in downtown Nixa for sale for $90,000? I’ll take it! Then I can worry about what to put into it. That’s the sort of thinking that has me carrying two houses in a freefalling real estate market. Maybe it’s the way an existentialist dreams, where existence of an asset precedes the essence of an asset. Or maybe I’m just better at dreaming than the actual planning that one needs to be a good steward of wealth.
• I am a miser until I’m suddenly profligate. I buy off brands at the grocery store, I wear my shoes out, and I wear inherited clothing for a decade (and counting). But when I suddenly find out that I can’t just pump a novel into Kindle without a cover, suddenly I hire a professional graphic designer, buy 10 ISBNs, and go the print-on-demand route even though I know I’ll end up buying at least $250 worth of my own name in print just to spread around amongst my friends. I put off purchasing some repairs and repair items, furniture purchases when we can make do with hand-me-down bureaus with scaring from a puppy chewing in 1985, but when the plant center opens in the spring, I spend $200 on plants, soil, and equipment per trip into town. When I was a youth, it was the same way; I’d put my paychecks in the bank for a couple weeks, and then one night at the mall with an ATM card, I’d blow the whole wad except for bus fare on videos, video games, books, and music (and then I’d fan my purchases out when I got home with the delicious anticipation of what I’d do first).

With all of these foibles working against me and with the other limitations hard-coded into me, I’ll never be superwealthy. Even if I won the lottery or somehow else came upon a pile of money, no doubt I’d burn through it in the aforementioned manners pretty quickly.

Ah, but how much fun I would have in those few years, fanning my purchases out with the delicious anticipation of what I’d do first. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a little time to go through the real estate ads like they were the Sears Wishbook and I am five years old.

So my oldest child goes to preschool, and one of the tasks we were warned about in the parental orientation was that at some unspecified future time, he would bring home a Letter Bag and would need to return to school with a number of things that start with that letter to discuss. Wait, let me dramatically re-create the scene for you.

Teacher: And the list of things we don’t want the child to bring to school include toys, gifts or cards for individuals if not for everyone, candy, firearms, books by Al Franken or Barbara Ehrenreich, or anything whose radiation level exceeds 4 microrems.

Parents: Okay.

Teacher: We have the Letter Bag, where the child will bring back things that have the letter of the day in them and will discuss them. For example, if the letter is J, the child can bring in a jelly bean.

Child: A jelly bean? That’s candy. You said I wasn’t supposed to bring candy to school.

At any rate, you get the gist.

So the child today announced that the Awesome Letter Bag was coming home, and with this great power he had great responsibility. Well, he didn’t say that; although he loves Spider-Man at age 4, he’s not versed enough in the mythos to recognize that trope (and he doesn’t use SPIDER-MAN! as a power word or expletive like he uses STAR WARS!). But the letter of the week is C, so his task was to gather things with the letter C in them.

I am a bad daddy because my mind immediately went to inappropriate things that begin with C for a preschooler to bring to school and the accompanying explanations. Things like:

• Chianti, which Daddy makes us drink on nights where he cooks liver and beans for dinner.
• Castor beans. Daddy sometimes cooks these after I go to bed and wears gloves and a mask.
• Cat o’Nine Tails. Daddy has explained the rules as to when junior mariners can be flogged.
• Chihuahua. Of course, we’d have to get one of those handbag-adapted models. Which leads me to wonder, are those dogs specifically bag-trained?

In the end, of course, I did the right thing and he schlepped off with a number of toys depicting things beginning with C. Because I know that he’s got a permanent record at school, but I wonder if they’re also keeping a permanent record on me, the parent, and they probably don’t share my sense of humor.

Yes, I know, I think he’s an heretic for his stance on book hoarding, but that doesn’t mean James Lileks cannot be one of the bagger brotherhood. Just a heretical brother:

The clerk started beeping my goods, and I noted right away she was just tossing stuff in the bag. She was also talking with a friend who’d shown up, and they were chatting away in fine style about something or other. When she gave me my first bag I looked into its disordered depths, and sighed: no. So I repacked it. If she saw she didn’t care. The second bag needed repacking, especially since a huge bladder of orange juice was on top of some small easily-crushed items. Framing a bag is a skill, a challenge; it’s like Tetris, except all the pieces are differently shaped. There’s satisfaction in framing a bag properly, and I say that as someone who used to bag groceries for his salt.

I repacked four bags. When I was done I realized that she’d finished, and I hadn’t signed the card-reader, and the person behind me was glaring at me: GET ON WITH IT. So in a matter of minutes I’d gone from Mr. Generous, waving people ahead in line, to Mr. Obstacle. I apologized deeply – almost said “if you’d seen me wave someone ahead a few minutes ago you would know I’m a good person!” but they all say that; all the people who just don’t realize there are other people in the world think they’re good people – and moved along. Ran right into a manager. Now. Do I say something?

Damn right I do. If the clerk had looked new or harried or just plain not cut out for the job, or new at this, let it slide, but when someone stands there babbling away to a pal throwing everything into the bag so the bottle of spaghetti sauce is crushing the muffins, so to speak, sorry.

I jerked a thumb back to the checkout lane. “18 needs to watch the video on framing again,” I said. The manager looked at my bags. “I repacked them,” I said. “The wrong stuff was on top of small stuff.”

“Thank you,” said the manager.

In his Bleat, Lileks wonders if he was wrong to complain to the manager. Wrong or right, I’m the sort of cynic who wonders if Lileks’ complaint had any effect at all. Would the manager really spend even minimum wage money to make that particular clerk go through the orientation video again? Would the manager have a word with the clerk? Would the manager even remember the remark by the time he got back from the loading dock? I doubt it.

Stories like this one make me wonder if I would have been good enough to go to the championship:

In February, Scott Hall, a Price Cutter employee, will be in Las Vegas, competing for a $10,000 prize and a chance to appear on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

His claim to fame? Bagging groceries.

Hall, a part-time cashier/bagger at the Price Cutter store at Grand Street and Chestnut Expressway, recently won the state championship in grocery bagging to advance to the national competition.

Cue the Bruce Springsteen.

I worked at a Shop Rite while I was at the university, and I was the best damned bagger that Shop Rite ever saw. I could keep up even with Trudy and Carolyn, the fastest checkers, even when they were going full speed. Back in those days, brother, the stores did not have a second conveyor belt or turntable to leisurely ride the product to the bagger; instead, the checkers flashed the UPCs past the scanner and whipped the groceries down to the bagger. You had to be fast, or Trudy could break your hand with a can of peas.

I could distribute the goods among bags, I could double bag or even senselessly put paper inside the plastic bags (some people thought that gave the plastic bags the strength of paper bags, but really, it just put four plastic-punching corners in the bag with the focused weight of all the contents). I could face the frozen and the dairy quickly. I could hear a checker call for a price check from all the way in the back of the store and round the corner to the checkouts before the courtesy counter person got her hands on the PA microphone. I walked so fast to handle those price checks that I beat a checker in a race once where she ran.

Ah, but the grocery store was a world of up or out, and I got promoted from bagger to checker to produce clerk. I stayed with it for four years, working between 20 and 50 hours a week and carrying a full college load between shifts (literally: some mornings I’d work 4-7, ride down to school on the bus, attend classes, and ride back to the store for a couple more hours in the afternoon). But even in my non-fulltime days, I was still the best bagger in the store, and even now I elbow the lackadaisical parttimers away from the end of the checkout lane when I’m grocery shopping. A number of stores now feature those conveyances that prevent one from honing one’s skills, but some of the older Price Cutters still have manual ends. I’d guess Hall’s Price Cutter is one of those.

Could I have been a state competitor, champion, and representative to the nationals? I’d like to think so. But the best part of reminiscing about What Might Have Been is the ongoing belief in maybe, and not simply remembering What Was Not.

UPDATE: As seen on Neatorama.