[Leica] working & earning & lifetsyle

[manolito at videotron.ca (EPL)]

Chris Crawford wrote:

"Those jobs today pay so little that the airfare to get you there and back
will exceed your earnings for the summer. Its not about being 'too good'
to work, its being too smart to work for nothing. If I wanted to work for
$7.75 an hour, I'd stay in Fort Wayne and work at Walmart (they start at
$8 here!) and it wouldn't cost me a fortune to fly to the work location.

If I asked my father for a loan to fly to Alaska to work for minimum wage,
he'd slap up side the head and ask me how an educated man could
contemplate doing something so damned stupid (seriously, he would say
that!) when I could make that here and save the airfare. Rightly so."

Rightly so indeed. Chris, Your father would upslap you (hell, I'll do it for
him), just because you expect to get flown to your new life in Alaska by
airplane, probably with an in-flight Brad Pitt movie, a free luggage
allowance, a meal with booze and a working toilet too!

The traditional ways of fleeing to lands of greater opportunity usually
involve crowded steerage passage below deck on a creaking boat, negotiating
treacherous mountain passes at night in the company of sketchy smugglers,
riding the roofs of trains, or being smothered in the back of lorries full
of livestock. 

To Alaska, one could take the Greyhound, hitch-hike (remember that?) or
maybe even ride a bicycle up through British Columbia and the Yukon--
honourable transports all.

Air travel is a luxury most people in the world cannot afford or even
imagine, a fact easily forgotten (indeed, never known) by your average
Leicaist.

Emanuel