You know, I think I can determine why, aside from the obvious attitude reasons, that the poor hate the rich so passionately.
I make a fair living, but I need to work hard to do it and, in the past, working more than one job in a 24 hour period was not unusual. I somehow never managed to fall into one of those nice, $40 an hour jobs, probably because, when offered a way to them, I was unwilling to cut the throats of every coworker in my vicinity to get there, like previous employees were busily doing.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the working stiff.
I went with a friend of mine, who is in construction, to help him with a small tile repair in a wealthy couples bathroom. Actually, I went along for fun and to take a look inside one of these nice houses in one of the many, many gated communities around here. This place, I figured, started at around $900,000. It was huge. I live in a comfortable old $75,000 CBS home that was built sometime in the 1960s and have 3 bedrooms, each about 14 X 14, two baths – the big one in the hall and a small half bath in the master bedroom. The lot is 60 X 90. I have trees.
I have a carport/garage that always seems to be used for storing everything except the car. My neighbor turned his garage into a family room by sealing the garage door shut and paneling it over on the inside. He puts up with the big, main air conditioner air handler in there, though he cleverly covered it in paneling and opened up a duct to cool the room.
I think it looks good.
Upon entering this place on about an acre of landscaped lawn with my friend, I walked into a living room that ECHOED our foot steps with a complete living room suite in it that held an enormous, leather sectional and huge fireplace and highly polished, expensive tile floor. (The owner, a man in his middle years with a bankers hairstyle and politician-style glasses proudly informed us about how he had the tiles made from a certain color clay in Washington State to please his wife. I figured they probably spent at least $15,000 on that floor – enough for me to add a room onto my home.)
I will not bore you with the rest of the opulent place, but get to the point. We entered the bathroom and I walked into Crapper Wonder! My bathroom is a standard thing, you know sink-vanity-toilet, then tub and walls. Around 8 feet long by maybe 5 feet wide. Good lighting, tiled shower walls, big mirror over the sink with vanity lights, shiny, surgical-handle faucets, storage under the sink for TP, cleaners, towels and a few drawers for magazines and other things. Humming vent fan in the roof to remove all stink and shower humidity.
I’ve had to do with much worse. In one place, I could sit on the crapper, lean forward and rest my head on the opposite wall while setting a cup of coffee on the raised shower lip and lean one side against the corner of the sink. Cozy. <sarcasm>
The bathroom was a house!
It must have been something like 28 or 30 feet long, with big, frosted, full sized windows forming a wall at one end, festooned with those fancy, wavy, artsy drapes or curtains and loaded with enough potted plants to satisfy Tarzan. The floor was a designed tile in big squares with what looked like hand painted Mexican designs on each making up some mural. The walls were tiled halfway up in tiles that matched, only smaller and there were two sinks and two huge vanities on two of the walls, with marble tops, what appeared to be surgical steel trappings, copper pulls and stacks of colorful, matching towels.
Fart in there and it would echo!
There was on one wall a huge, multiple nozzled, glass shower, across from that a swimming pool sized bathtub that you stepped down into and studded with enough jet nozzles to make it look like a flying saucer. The ceiling was high, with two brass ceiling fans and recessed spot lights, along with low wattage DC mini-lights under assorted cabinets and recessed into the corners of the roof.
The Crapper itself – and bidet – was situated in a smaller room, with a great frosted window, complete with stocked book rack, small TV (oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the two small TVs in the main room of the bathroom) assorted accent and reading lights and a ventilator that hummed so sweetly and softly that you barely knew it was there.
A few stools and chairs were positioned in there also.
The colors were cool cream and beige.
I couldn’t have taken a dump in there. It would have been like taking a dump in a living room. BTW, the windows are those electronic things. Turn a dial and they go from dense, frosty opaque to crystal clear.
I kept talking in a whisper as my friend chipped out a couple of broken tiles in the glass shower (he making soft comments about what he and his wife could do with a shower with that many heads positioned in all of those interesting ways) and me thinking that a young couple could move into the same space as their first apartment!
When we left, I decided that if the rich can spend probably enough money for a single bathroom, which would build around 3 rooms onto my house, and that they had that much cash to squander, then something is definately wrong with the system. I figure that bathroom could have paid for 3 houses built by Habitat For Humanity and given 3 families homes!
When we left, my buddy told me that I did not even want to visit their playroom, because the resulting depression it would cause might require medication. He had this fixed grin on his face, but I could tell that he was wondering why he was busting his ass 6 days a week, working 10 hour days in an often dirty job when he would never, ever be able to even make enough money to afford half of what those people had.
I thought I was making good money.
I don’t think so anymore because I have visited the crapper Supreme! The Venus DE-Milo of bathrooms!
