It’s Been a Privilege
In college, I had a friend named Mally. She was a couple of years younger than the rest of the people in our group and still lived at home with her parents.
They had very strict cultural beliefs about how an unmarried woman should not live away from home. Still, her dad was a doctor and also had family money, so they were quite wealthy for our area.
The sort of wealthy, where, for her 16th birthday, they bought her a Porsche, and when they didn’t think she thanked them adequately for it, they returned it.
Anyway, I remember when the group of us were at some of the guys’ on-campus apartment, their toilet clogged. Mally, without really blinking, said we should call our plumber to get it fixed.
Of course, the guys were like “Uh, no? It’s just clogged. Why would we call a plumber?” to which Mally, who was very confused, replied, “Because that’s what plumbers do?
Why would you do it yourself?” So we then explained first, how expensive plumbers are, and second, how the average person does not call a plumber for a slightly clogged toilet.
But it took an even more ridiculous turn.
Mally was confused and then asked, “Well, what do you do when a light bulb burns out? Change it yourself?” and obviously, we were all nodding and saying “Yeah, absolutely.” So that was when we discovered just how sheltered and out of touch Mally was with how normal people do things.
We specifically learned that she didn’t know how to change a light bulb. Or anything, really.
By anything I mean: change a light bulb, plunge a toilet, cook anything, put gas in her car. All because either their maids did it for her or her dad did.
It blew her mind when we explained that those are very normal things to know how to do. Eventually, we ended up showing her how to do all those things for herself.