The game is simple enough. Roll a dice and move your marker the prescribed number of squares. Land on the bottom rung of a ladder and move up the ladder. Land on the head of a snake and slide back down. Not even as strategic as tic-tac-toe. Pure luck.
In life, I’ve found things to be not so cut and dried. Often what looks like a fast track comes with a greater expense. The Stoics (the dudes who subscribe to Stoicism) have a phrase for this; they call it the tax. For everything, there is a tax. The mafia calls it the ‘price of doing business’. Or like Elliot Gould’s character, Reuben says in Ocean’s 11, “These kinds of things used to be civilised; you’d hit a guy, he’d whack you, done.“
The number of times I’ve taken a ‘ladder’ and ended up paying a massive tax is nothing short of embarrassing so please don’t tell anyone. It ends up being one step forward and two steps back. Luckily I haven’t done it with anything super important but I’ve fucked enough little things up so as to finally learn the lesson.
Most often I tend to look for the ladder when patience is required; like waiting for paint to dry before moving onto the next step, or not going to the garage to get the correct driver and ruining a screw head or clicking OK before reading the bit about erasing the hard drive. I’ve done it on photo shoots and film sets too. Again, nothing major, just annoying and/or embarrassing.
But it’s the waste or tax as the Stoics say that really pisses me off. The additional time, the further work or the extra expense which is required to get back to square one, the starting point, just makes me want to kill; usually myself.
You must be logged in to post a comment.