But Margaret cooled me right there. Putting down her mug, she said that before I got into one of my Exercised Young Man states, I should realize that the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we're terrified of what would happen if we stopped.  "We're not built for free time as a species.  We think we are, but we aren't."  Then she began almost talking to herself.  I'd gotten her going.  She was saying that most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that at the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of those moments connect together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting.

Well.  You see that morbid and self-destructive impulses were overtaking me that morning and that Margaret was more than willing to sweep her floor into my fireplace.  So we sat there watching tea steep (never a fun thing to do, I might add) and in a shared moment listened to the office proles discuss whether a certain game show host had or had not had cosmetic surgery recently.

"Hey, Margaret," I said, "I bet you can't think of one person in the entire of the world who hasn't become famous without a whole lot of cash changing hands along the way."

She wanted to know what this meant, so I elaborated.  I told her people simply don't... can't become famous in this world unless a lot of people make a lot of money.  The cynicism of this took her aback, but she answered my challenge at face value.  "That's a big harsh, Dag.  What about Abraham Lincoln?"

"No go.  That was all about slavery and land.  Tons-o'-cash happening there."

So she says, "Leonardo da Vinci," to which I could only state that he was a businessman like Shakespeare or any of those old boys and that all of his work was purely on a commission basis and even worse, his research was used to support the military.

"Well, Dag, this is just the stupidest argument I've ever heard," she starts saying, getting desperate.  "Of course people became famous without people making money out of it."

"So name one, then."

I could see Margaret's thinking flail her, her features dissolving and reforming, and I was feeling just a little too full of myself, knowing that other people in the cafeteria had started to listen in on the conversation.  I was the boy in the baseball cap driving the convertible again, high on his own cleverness and ascribing darkness and greed to all human endeavours.  That was me.

"Oh, all right, you win," she says, conceding me a pyrrhic victory, and I was about to walk out of the room with my coffee (now the Perfect-But-Somewhat-Smug-Young-Man) when I heard a little voice at the back of the coffee room say, "Anne Frank."

Well.

I pivoted around on the ball of my foot, and who did I see, looking quietly defiant but dreadfully dull and tuddy, but Charlene sitting next to the megatub of office acetaminophen tablets.  Charlene with her trailer-park bleached perm, meat-extension recipes culled from Family Circle magazine, and neglect from her boyfriend; the sort of person who when you drew their name out of the hat for the office Christmas party gifts, you say, "Who?"

"Anne Frank?" I bellowed, "Why of course there was money there, why..." but, of course, there was no money there.  I had unwittingly declared a moral battle that she had deftly won.  I felt awfully silly and awfully mean.

douglas coupland
generation x