My wife and I make okay money in a middle class area, but, due to a combination of good luck, and contrived to circumstances, we recently got to watch a college football game in the stadium’s super executive corporate sponsor level suite. It was awesome. Open bar, amazing catered food, and people networking all around me who are clearly in the c-suite of their respective companies. I had a list of crazy things I was going to say if someone asked me what I did, but it never came up.
I got very randomly bumped up to first class on a transatlantic flight for business. I do not travel much for business, especially internationally. So, I definitely should not have had priority over more regular accounts. I have to assume I just got lucky, and that flight happened to have no frequent flyers.
It was an eye opening experience. I got to hang out in a secret lounge. When my flight was ready to board, multiple staff escorted us to the gate. When we landed, we took a private van to a secret side entrance, which had its own first class only passport check. We were brought to another secret first class lounge through hidden back hallways to wait for our connections. The lounge looked down over the terminal, and the exit was a nondescript door you’d assume was a maintenance entrance.
Being around that level of service and the other people in first class, it’s clear the wealthy live in another world. I looked up how much that ticket normally goes for after, and full price is for many people a yearly salary. It was nice, but it seems like a crazy way to divide resources.
A girl I dated was friends with the daughter of one of Microsoft’s founders and we got invited to their house to watch Seafair. I think it’d be safe to call it a small mansion right on the water with a dock. The kitchen was as big as my whole apartment. The technology was a bit dated but must’ve been state of the art when it was built. Switches for automated everything. On the water we had front row seats to the Blue Angels. They are incredibly loud up close.
The guy was super down to earth. Had a good conversation where he showed genuine interest in me and what I did.
9.9/10, the hot tub was broken
Paul Allen had no kids so you could just say one of Bill Gates’ daughters.
No helicopter food delivery? She was definitely holding back on the super foods. She must have liked you, to not spook you away with the show of wealth.
Bill Gates definitely hit the late burger and roast beef joints in Cambridge and Boston back in the day.
Bill Gates seems like a chill dude to talk too. Maybe one of these days.
Though I wouldn’t suggest bringing up open source software around him. Unless it’s to bitch about people doing things for free when you want to charge lots of money for it.
“Oh yeah I contribute to Linux branches every once in a while”
“…You what?”
Honestly, where I live now.
I rent a bare-bones townhouse. Two rooms, and a basement with an old washer and dryer, and a small garage.
I have always lived in apartments, sometimes with fewer rooms than people. Having an entire place of my own (that’s not a studio apartment) is sometimes unbelievable to me. A washer and dryer downstairs? No quarters? I don’t have to look for a spot, I have a garage? I don’t have to cram my entire life in one room, I have an “office!?” This will likely be the closest to “home owner” I’ll get and it still feels unreal after almost two years here. It’s certainly not going into anyone’s Pinterest board, and there are issues, but I always feel “bougie” when I open the garage 🤣
I felt like that when we rented the townhouse. It was also pretty bare bones, but it was nice to have a house. Sadly the landlord evicted us so his kid could have his place, so I ended up in an apartment again, and now my rent is so much more as we lived in the townhouse for so long. I do have a washer and dryer and dishwasher though so at least that is nice and it’s beautifully renovated but it still sucks. We had this incredible patio garden.
One time I went to the restaurant DAMON BAEHREL. I was informed afterwards that it had a 10-year waiting list and only seated 100 people a month. Despite having regularly commuted between the Midwest and the East Coast, getting there felt like the longest road trip I’ve ever taken since I had to go with my mother-in-law and some of it is on a gravel road.
I had to Google DAMON BAEHREL to spell it and I’m not going to bother retyping it.
It was far and away the most pretentious, absurd, cartoonishly fancy experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve dressed up in antique ceremonial Moroccan robes for a banquet at the art museum in the city I grew up in. At the art museum I sat next to the mayor’s mother in a room of 200 people conversely, about 30 people total could fit into DAMON BAEHREL.
I thought the art museum banquet was fancy, but when I was little I thought Boston Market and IBC root beer were fancy.
DAMON BAEHREL was the kind of place that serves a dozen ‘courses’ but each one is like one cracker one sliver of cheese and one spritz of condiment with maybe a sliver of sausage made from some bespoke farm animal. He insisted that the water we were drinking was actually unreduced tree sap. Everything was served on various slabs of wood some with the bark still on it. The slabs were so much larger than the food It looked like putting a coin on a serving platter for each course.
I just felt embarrassed every time I looked at the Damon and his staff. They had clearly heard his bullshit so many times that it was hard for them to feign credulity anymore.
Anyway, that shit was way too fancy for me. Clearly it was just wasted on me.
Yeah, but how was that food?
I just tried a fine dining restaurant for the first time this past weekend.
I was just curious after watching a bunch of cooking competitions on Netflix about how good that kind of food could be so decided to find a Michelin star restaurant and give it a try.
While the portions were small, the food was on another level. Even the “worst” of it was only that because it wasn’t amazing, but still really good.
The food was so good that when I got home and snacked that night, it was hard to enjoy any of my usual favorite snacks because it all felt so basic after that.
It was fancy in other regards, too. Like when my buddy went to the bathroom, someone came over and folded his cloth napkin rather than leave it bunched up on the table.
Plus, even though the portions were tiny and we joked about whether we’d need to stop for fast-food afterwards, by the end of the 9 or so courses, I felt completely satisfied. Even the snacking I mentioned was more due to the munchies than actual hunger.
It was expensive though. Two taster menu plus two drinks each came to about 500 CAD plus tip. And it was one of the cheaper options. There was a two Michelin star sushi place that advertised seats starting at 800 and I’m not even sure that includes any food, though I think it gets the “chef cooks what he wants” menu, which tbf would probably be way better than what I’d want anyways.
This place only needed to be booked like a month in advance, so the place you’re talking about sounds like it’s on another level itself. Though I’m curious how much that other level translates to better food.
Fine dining is one thing but the ultra exclusive, incredibly pretentious, top of the range place like DAMON BAEHREL is on another level entirely and has ceased, long ago, to be about making something a person wants to eat.
It’s about the art in just about the worst way possible. Fair play to the people who are into this but it’s complete bullshit, relies on borderline slave labour to produce and actively dislikes it’s audience.
I wanted to learn more and found this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/damon-baehrel-the-most-exclusive-restaurant-in-america
Sounds like the ten year wait list might be made up and who knows where he gets his meats, but the whole thing just sounds fascinating. From his website, the current price is $550 USD a head, though it’s subject to change several times per week.
He sounds like one of those guys that has a whole bunch of little projects going on at any time and over the years accumulated enough results from those to host some volume of dinner parties. And possibly exaggerates or lies about some of them (though hard to say if he treats his cooking similarly to how he treats his legend/myth).
I’m convinced that Damon Baehrel is a semi-fake restaurant. Like, it’s real, but doesn’t actually take reservations or serve real guests, and the owner/chef lies about everything in order to seem more mysterious.
This article from 2016 lays out the case.
So I don’t think it’s a particularly good example of fine dining, as it’s doing a lot of things different from a normal restaurant that is open to members of the public.
Not mine, but my uncle’s story. In the late 70s or 80s, can’t remember, my uncle was a young man in Boston, MA. New transplant to the US with limited English working minimum wage at a famous hotel in town, by famous I mean all the rock and roll stars stayed in this hotel when they were in Boston. There are other wild stories for another day.
On this day his manager was scrambling to look for him and told him that he had to drive a VIP somewhere. He was speechless, and asked wtf is going on ? He had a humble tiny hatchback manual drive ford fiesta? with only a driver’s side mirror. The artist was Blondie and she was late for the show. They wanted the most non descript car to zip halfway through the clogged city to the venue.
He was like wtf, but fuckkit here we go.
He drove the Blondie singer from the hotel to the venue quick and easy like superman and saved the day.
I have to go back and ask what conversation they had.
Debbie Harry! I wonder what she thought of the whole thing haha
Ohhhhn Blondie, I thought you were just being weirdly descriptive
Me too. Thanks goodness he’s still alive. Barely. I’ll ask him and post followup. I wish she could read this post and give some background
Blondie is the band and Debbie Harry is the singer’s name.
I got invited to some sort of literary award ceremony at the French embassy a few years back. I, uh, severely underdressed for the occasion. I got the invite for participating in the Albertine book store’s bookclub, and for whatever reason, my brain went, “I can show up to this like I would dress for a bookclub session, it’s the same people.” Spoiler, it was not, and I really should have been at least in a button up and slacks, rather than my hoodie and jeans. As luck would have it, the gentleman who won the award, Emmanuel Dongala, was sat next to me during the speeches. I can still remember the look of “What the classless, American fuck is this guy doing?” as he took his seat next to me.
On the other hand, I went to my first opera at the NY Metropolitan Opera last year basically dressed the same way, and it was surprisingly entirely fine. Turns out, very few people want to be sat for hours in formal attire when hardly anyone can see you in the dark, anyway.
Which opera did you see? I am an opera lover and I’ve seen people wearing tuxedos with flip-flops, and a dog wearing a rhinestone necklace.
I went and saw Nabucco. Was pretty enjoyable, and I got to sit in the orchestra section with one of the cheaper tickets they release the day of the performance. Would go back for another if I could avail myself of the program again.
I had also deliberately picked one of the shorter operas they put on that season, wasn’t trying to commit to some 5 hour monstrosity straight out the gate.
Nabucco is a good way to begin with opera indeed! Very early Verdi and definitely not the quality of his later most famous works but still pretty amazing. The role of Abigaille is called a voice wrecker so it’s not often performed. Glad you liked.
I was an active duty surgical tech in the US military; promoted fairly quickly and ranked up to Staff Sergeant at about 3 years. Shortly after taking that rank, we had a perfect storm of deployments, a retirement, a medical separation, etc that left me as the highest ranking enlisted in the surgery unit, which made me (a still-kinda-newby-surgical-tech) taking the responsibilities of basically a charge nurse. Chief among these was attending morning morning briefs with the top dogs of the hospital (high ranking officers) and giving report. Fortunately I knew where to access the OR’s metrics, so my report was always just a summary of our case load, average times, etc.
This lasted only about a week until we got a new Master Sergeant and Tech Sergeant. Apparently I got some pretty high praise from those top dogs for stepping up (not like I had a choice) and doing a decent job – but that was PURE luck lol. I only did well because things went relatively smoothly on their own. If there was an emergency or something I would have had no fucking clue what to do; and all the junior enlisted seemed to just know that I wouldn’t have been able to do shit for them during that time, so everyone kept the smaller fires to themselves during that time.
It was a weird time.
Similar. Two cases. First was taking charge of the entire Bases secure network upgrade because I was the only one who knew how the new devices worked. I ended up having to attend a meeting with a General and his staff and had to be chaperoned by an E5 because I was only an E3 at the time.
The second was my entire time working in White House Comms. Can’t talk much about it but I’m sure you can imagine how out of place it would feel.
I have been picked up by a private airplane once. And I don’t mean an private jet like a bombardier global (which are still beyond cool), I mean like a full size long range airliner. The conference room alone was larger than my apartment at the time. Who especially was send my our customer to pick up my colleague and me. Even crazier: As it was somewhat urgent the customer “called” someone in his countries air traffic control and even though we arrived through rush hour at this airport we landed priority - which meant around 12 large airliners had to wait.
(To make that clear: I am not a prostitute, especially as I am a ugly ass overweight dude, but I work in healthcare and did a fair share of VVIP jobs over the last two decades)
What kind of healthcare you working in with the kind of commute? I’m good at my job nursing but I can’t imagine that’s someething people get flown in for.
Used to work in aeromedical retrieval for a company that has very strong presence in the Gulf region and a somewhat established presence in central Asia. .
Someone’s gotta give that sheik’s new chick a nice pair of tiddies.
Actually no, I refuse to be associated with cosmetic/fashion style plastic surgery completely for personal reasons. I even don’t work on the anaesthesia side of these cases.
I wasn’t entirely sincere in my comment.
Fundraiser at a very expensive art school. I was a scholarship student at a cocktail mixer, and I was at the mixer because it was being held in the department I was majoring in. All of the people that were attending were fine arts patrons, the kind of people that drop tens of thousands on art without thinking twice about it. I was–literally–a punk kid with tattoos and shit tons of piercings, and I was supposed to be pleasant to people with millions more than I’ll ever have.
Got to piss off a world famous fashion designer that evening, so that was cool.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear more about the world famous fashion designer you pissed off. That sounds funny
I… Can’t do that without giving away far too much personal information. Unfortunately.
Okay that’s fair. Thanks anyway
If they didn’t want to deal with punks they shouldn’t deal with art students. I hear the business students are perfectly pleasant if you lobotomize yourself.
Ironically, after working in production for over a decade, I’m hoping to go back to school for business management. Because it turns out that there’s zero career track and advancement potential if I stick with what I already know. Depressing shit.
What kind of art do you do?
I went to school for fashion design. (Hence interacting with a famous designer in school. Come to think of it, the head of the department at the time was someone with a significant international reputation. And I still think he’s a pretentious dick.) These days I do industrial print media, because I burned out hard in school, due to a combination of raging, untreated ADHD and 48+ hour days working in studio.
I would not recommend fashion design to anyone that has any interest in a healthy work/life balance, and fast fashion has absolutely gutted anything domestic that’s of any interest at all.
Drop names immediately please.
If I drop that name, that gives people enough to figure out which school I went to, what years, and they can correlate that with my post history to figure out exactly who I am IRL.
I’ve probably posted enough already that someone with a large enough database could do that already, but dropping names would make it much easier for just about any schmuck with an internet connection and decent search skill.
(And believe me, I would love to tell people the name of the pretentious dick that was the head of the department, but… Aaargh.)
Got an extra legroom seat in the airplane by chance.
These days I almost always buy that upgrade. I’m not tall or anything but for $50-100 extra it makes the flight so much more tolerable. That’s easy money on top of a $3000 vacation in my book.
And that’s how they get those fees. Effective, isn’t it.
Seat upgrades have been an uncharged for as long as I can remember. At least 30 years. I find it hard to believe they ever gave them away for free.
You bought coach, business, or first. Those were your upgrades from coach. There were no “tiers” in coach like coach “plus” or whatever extra legroom or no checked bag coach is called these days.
Seat pitch was the same for everyone.
They would charge more for window or aisle, that’s been a thing for a really long time.
They have always charged more for exit rows is what I’m saying. Premium economy is just a new tier.
Depends on the flight really. In your case I’d say yeah, it makes sense to upgrade; in my case I’m talking about a sub-1-hour flight that costs $60 in total without any upgrades. I’m on the taller side, but I’m still fine with a regular seat for such a short flight.
I went with a friend to Vegas. He was going to one of those super-posh conferences for his line of work, and just casually wanted to split the hotel bill (because he’s cheap; the dude could afford to live in one of those hotels year round). At the end of the conference, all of his colleagues were throwing some party at the top of one of the hotels on the strip. He helped me through the security screen and we left the elevator. We went from a world of bright lights and gaudiness to dark passion and sultry beats where each seat at their reclined cushion alcoves was worth thousands of dollars. Prostitution may be illegal in Vegas, technically, but escorts that looked like world-famous supermodels (male and female, to be clear) were writhing across every lap at those recessed tables.
My friend got me to the balcony, where I got a picture of the entire strip at night. Then my friend casually mentioned that getting a drink would be about $1200 and we went back down to the normal floors for the free booze and $2 blackjack.
I was working the booth at a conference and the sales guys closed some big deal there and took everybody at the conference out to a four star restaurant. Since it was in a legal state me and the woman from marketing got really baked before we went in and had $200 steaks with a $400 bottle of wine. There were like 10 people, too so the whole bill must have been at least $4,000.
She was high as hell the whole time and trying to hide it, which was hilarious for me to watch.
I’ve also had Iron Chef Morimoto make sushi for me but since I paid it didn’t feel above my station.
If they called it a “4 star” restaurant, they scammed you, that does not exist.
I never saw any stars. I just saw the prices.
Flew half-way across the country on a private plane for a business meeting.
The mayor used to know my name. Hollered at me at Mardi Gras!
Went to a party at the woman’s house who owns a vast chunk of downtown. Got to see the Mardi Gras parade from above.
I’ve lived in more than one trailer. Including a trailer park. I once slept over at a friend’s trailer in a different park. We had a pinecone war with kids from the other side of the trailer park. Pre-bedtime entertainment was Billy Ray Cyrus performing Achy Breaky Heart live on TNN.
I also worked on Capitol Hill, a finance firm worth dozens of billions, etc. My degree is from a shitty Christian college, but I just accepted a job at a prominent research university (staff, not faculty, but still).
I guess I feel like most of my life is relevant to this question.
Good job remembering where you came from my friend. Keep up the good work. You should also remember to pat yourself on the back every once In a while. Be honest and true to yourself. Help the next generation move in the right direction.
Was gonna say everyone with impostor syndrome thinks their life is this.
Years ago my dad took me with him to a business trip in downtown LA. He finished his meeting and we wanted some dinner so started looking around for somewhere to eat. It was in the financial district though, and by 5 or 6 every fast food place around was already closed (which is still weird to me). We were about to give up and go back to our hotel and just get room service until we saw a plain ass sign pointing down an alley that just said “steakhouse.” So we followed it into the alley, down some stairs into a sketchy looking basement door that led us into the fanciest fucking restaurant I have ever been in.
Shit was straight out of a movie. The waiters had tuxedos. Everything was finished in nice looking wood, silver or gold. They had an actual maitre d! We immediately felt under dressed and had to ask if there was a dress code.
Well? Did you get food? Was it any good? Did they call you a peasant and tell you to buzz off?
They didn’t have a dress code, so we ate there. Pretty decent steakhouse; prices were a bit higher than, like, a Texas Roadhouse, but not as high as an Outback. I remember the baked potato was fucking enormous and they were all you could eat. But you probably wouldn’t even finish 1 because it was fuckin’ gigantic.
I wish I knew its name. They didn’t have a name on the menu, anywhere inside or on the outside. Literally the only thing even marking it as a restaurant was the little sign pointing into the alley that just said “steakhouse.” It’s like a sweet little secret.
That was no steakhouse. You straight up walked into a Mafia front. Like out of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal music video.
