My mother-in-law said something interesting to me yesterday. “If I could just make $30,000 a year, I would be set. Don’t you think?”
As a recovering spendthrift, and having made $30,000, or around, for the past several years, I am woefully aware how far that amount of money goes, and how far it doesn’t. True, my dear MIL has made less than $20,000, sometimes considerably less, for as long as I’ve known her. But making $30,000 would be just enough that she’d no longer qualify for all the public assistance she gets for her special-needs child, and that she’d have to foot the bill for everything, putting her effectively in the same place she is now. Then there’s the matter of the loans she’s recently taken out to get her Bachelor’s Degree.
I mention this to her.
“But don’t you think, after all these years of living cheap, I could continue to do that if I made more money?”
I nod.
“I do. Of course, I would upgrade a few things. I’d get a nicer apartment, and new dishes, and maybe some new clothes. I haven’t bought clothes in forever . . . “
We don’t even have to receive our riches before we start to spend them in our minds. And as we’ve all heard, our thoughts become our words, and our words become our (very telling) actions.
Later on, I’m helping my MIL fix her bedframe. The two supports running across the frame had fallen, leaving no support for the mattress. Upon looking at the frame, I noticed that there were holes that were meant to fasten the supports to the top board so that this didn’t happen, but the holes didn’t line up with the supports.
“Talk about manufacturing stupidity!” my MIL says to me. “It’s obviously a design flaw.”
My eyebrows furrowed as I tried to make sense of the situation. Being a carpenter’s daughter who is very familiar with IKEA, I’ve never encountered a piece that that is actually manufactured wrong. It’s usually put together wrong and, as a result, usually falls apart.
“Are you sure the boards aren’t upside down?” I ask. This is not an unreasonable question. I just saw her try to fit the support beams into the side panels with the floor padding up instead of down. Not surprisingly, the holes didn’t fit.
“No. They’re right. It’s just manufacturer’s stupidity.”
I find it interesting that when we say “design flaw” or “manufacturer’s stupidity”, what’s really going on is “user error”. We become so convinced that we are right and that something/someone else is the real problem, that we are unable to see our own mistakes.
This is probably why approximately 85% of drivers would rate themselves as in the top 5% in skill. Even drivers who have been the cause of accidents. I will readily admit that I am one of those 85% of drivers and I have caused an accident. But I learned, see? So I really still am a good driver. Really.
