So again I have been too busy to write Pokémon stuff for you this week, which is why there is no more playthrough journal at the moment, but I do want to take a moment to talk to you about what I had for lunch yesterday.
Yesterday for lunch I had two vegetarian samosas with vindaloo sauce from a takeaway curry place on the grounds of the university where I work and study. They were delicious, but this is not as relevant as you might think. What is relevant is that I paid for these delicious samosas and their vindaloo sauce by putting a plastic card in a slot and pressing some buttons. I possessed nothing of worth which I could exchange for my lunch (well, except for my books, which I need to do my job properly), nor did I provide the staff of the Indian takeaway place with any useful service. I just presented them with a bit of plastic (which I then took back afterwards!) and keyed a sequence of numbers into a pad (without even revealing what those numbers were!), and I think it is really quite astonishing that I live in the world where this is a totally legitimate way of obtaining delicious samosas with vindaloo sauce.
Let’s think about what’s happening here. I’m talking, of course, about an EFTPOS transaction, whereby some money is transferred from my bank account to the bank account of the company which produces the delicious samosas. As far as I know, this money exists only as numbers on a computer screen. I suppose it’s possible that the bank actually has a bunch of little vaults and that the bank staff shuttle piles of coins from one to another whenever I buy samosas, but I find this unlikely. At any rate I have never seen these coins if they exist, since the money was paid directly into my bank account by the university. The university gives me this money because, four times every week, I stand up in front of a group of 20-odd undergrads and baffle them with nonsense like this, as well as reading the pieces of paper given to me by those same undergrads and explaining to them why everything they have just told me is not only wrong but potentially insane. Since I perform these tasks diligently and with integrity, the university tells the bank to take some of the numbers next to its name and put them next to my name instead. Most of the numbers next to the university’s name are derived from government funding, which in turn are derived from taxes collected each year from the people of New Zealand, as determined, planned and arranged by the duly elected magistrates of our democratic government. As far as I am aware, the people who make my delicious samosas enjoy no benefit, themselves, from my duties, and I suspect it would not matter if they did.
As far as I can make out, then, the people of my country, acting through the person of their elected officials, have collectively decided that, by peddling befuddlement to my students in a misguided attempt to expand their minds, I am performing a useful service to my society, and that in recognition of this service, I have the right to consume delicious samosas on a regular basis, and furthermore, that anyone willing to provide me with these delicious samosas should be rewarded in turn, in a manner of their own choosing. And all of this is represented by the action of a slim piece of plastic and the movement of a few digits.
I find it truly amazing the things people take for granted.
Pokémaniacal 