So….pardon this little digression….but I witnessed something truly unexpected this evening that seems related to this whole mortgage meltdown/economic depression mess in ways I bet most people aren’t thinking about.
I got a random phone call a few days ago inviting me to participate in a “focus group” this evening. When I agreed, the caller promised to send me a post card reminder, and added to the enticement by also promising a cash $75.00 payment at the end of the one hour meeting. Hard to argue with….I don’t know very many people who are so comfy they’d walk away from free gas money without a a good reason.
Earlier today, I fielded two more phone calls from the focus group planners, both wanting me to confirm my attendance for this evening. “I’ll be there,” I assured them.
I showed up at the appointed hour, along with 400 (give or take) other recruits.
The meeting organizers were looking pretty harried when I approached the check-in table. By the time I had worked my way up the line, there were a few dozen people standing around looking disgruntled. I wondered what was going on, but didn’t worry. I knew I was in the right place.
The name checkers, it turned out, did NOT know I was in the right place. They were working from authoritative master lists, printed only moments before they left for the meeting site, and those lists did NOT have my name on them. It was nowhere, not misspelled, not flipped around, plain old not there. I was beginning to understand why the stand-arounders were looking disgruntled.
“Did you receive a postcard in the mail?” they asked me. “I was told I would receive one, but it never arrived,” I replied.
Well…we can’t let you in without a postcard if you’re not on the list.
Grrrrr….
While I weighed my options, I watched as the name-on-list folks were ushered into the auditorium. Then the doors slammed shut and the list-checkers announced: “Y’all can go home now; we can’t let you in.”
This is when it got ugly. Although I was irritated at having just wasted an hour of my life (and chagrined at being so blatantly misled), I was determined to keep my cool. For me, the $75 would have been an extra tank of gas and a burger dinner. It didn’t take long to figure out that for a lot of the people there, that $75 meant a whole lot more.
I saw people of all spots and stripes in that gallery, and most of them looked like they would have put the promised incentive payment to immediate use for survival basics. Some of them got abusive…at least linguistically….and the list-checkers returned as good as they got. They weren’t being paid enough for this gig to worry about who went away angry.
This random group of total strangers quickly took sides against the “authorities” in the green shirts, yelling at them, pressing en masse into a tight corner to get closer to the action, until the greenshirts had to climb on chairs to get above the fray and be heard.
The only male in the list-checking group held up his hands and said “I’m sorry, but we can’t do anything about this. We don’t have any more information, and we don’t know what went wrong. If you’re not on the list, we can’t let you in and that’s all we know. Please go home.”
Wow. Whoever screwed up the lists was NOT in the room (at least not as far as anyone knew). About half the delisted people left the building at that point, grumbling, swearing, shaking their heads. Some of those who remained continued to loudly berate the greenshirts (who were stuck in the building until the event was over). Others who remained stayed because they had to wait for friends or relatives who had been admitted to the meeting. It was a weird and wild mess. I wondered how long it would be before someone called the police, but – strangely enough – that didn’t happen.
It could have been uglier – it could have gotten physical – and I wondered why it didn’t. All i can conclude, thankfully, is this – yes, the economy sucks, and yes, it is affecting the common citizen profoundly in ways the wealthy cannot and will not appreciate. We can “do without” when it just affects us as individuals, but when we have to scrap and fight for every last bit of “extra” then we don’t hold back for long when those opportunities are threatened. And lately, most of us see and feel those threats every day.
Before I went to the focus group meeting, I received a phone call that effectively killed a double-real estate transaction I had been working on for months. Net loss for me? More than $6,000. Not small potatoes in any budget, but in a year like this one, that’s a significant percentage of my annual income. Suddenly that $75 payout was more meaningful. I was going to put it in my piggy bank; now I think I could have really used just a little bit more padding in my bank account.
Recession’s over? I don’t think so. Not unless we’ve gone from recession to full-blown depression.
