So, Lise is off in Minneapolis for AWP. Neither one of us sleeps particularly well when we’re apart anyway, but she’s out there to talk to lots of people (not her favorite activity) and get them excited about Lithomobilus. And in the frenzy of packing, she remembered earplugs but forgot melatonin. The love of my life, on day 3, had slept for maybe 8 hours out of 72 and she was not doing well. This is where the Internet, the telephone, and modern banking combined to make me look like the best husband ever in the history of business travel.
I know that Trader Joe’s sells melatonin for not a lot of money. I know they’re a national chain. So I used Google to find out that, hey, in Minneapolis there are three Trader Joe’s stores, each less than half an hour’s drive from the hotel.
But wait, Lise is stuck on the book fair floor; she doesn’t have time to run off to TJs! The hotel concierge isn’t answering the phone! Oh noes, what do I do?
Google “personal concierge minneapolis” and come up with Twin City Concierge. Call ’em up, “Hey, my wife is in town for a convention and forgot to pack melatonin. Could you hit Trader Joe’s, get a bottle, and drop it at the hotel for her? Sure, just sometime before tonight. Sure, here’s my credit card info. Thank you so much!”
Boom. Lise was nearly in tears with gratitude (chalk that up to sleep deprivation) and was kind of surprised when I mentioned how reasonable the cost was. She pointed out that many people would not even consider making that call, assuming that it would be too expensive. This, she said, is an unseen privilege of money. We have enough money that, sure, we’d rather not spend money we don’t have to, but we have a different definition of, “have to,” than we did when we were broke, and that gave us the confidence that let us find out that this kind of personal service is way more affordable than we thought.
Lise told me that now I am:
- famous at AWP as the best husband ever and
- hated by all the other husbands for making them look bad.
To this latter point I can only say, dudes, that didn’t take me; y’all had that down all by yo’self.
Oh yeah, the title of this post. There are a zillion ridiculous quizzes on the web, which Harry Potter character would you invite on your dragon, and what would your job have been in which century should you have lived?
Telephones. Modern medicine. Lightning fast access to useful information about exotic and remote places. Currency that spends just fine 2,000 miles away. Currency that travels 2,000 miles faster than you can say the words, “two thousand miles.” Consumer protection laws and food and drug safety regulations that mean I can trust, sight unseen, that the pills are what they purport to be and do what they claim. You know what? Now. Now is good.