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Free, Scorned

5/8/06

"Whoa, really?  I don't think I've ever heard you talk about work that way."

My buddy Kellam and I were talking about my job so far this year; things have been going very well at my office.  I rarely talk badly about jobs but it is similarly rare for me to talk about how much I love working--but, I never had a job that I loved before my current job as a recruiter.  Both professionally and financially, I am very happy in my current position.

A big part of things this year has been a better set of positions that I have been asked to fill, and the resulting commissions from those positions have led to a much stronger income, at least for me.  I'll never make doctor/lawyer/NYC banker/drug dealer money, but for me, I'm in a good spot, with next year looking very sharp.  As such, I think that I can be a generous person but I really wanted to step it up this year if things progressed smoothly at work; through four months this year, I had already made more in commissions than I made all of last year.  So, I decided that I was going to lose my mind a little bit.  Even more than normal--I would start throwing free at my friends and family, not to show them up like I'm suddenly Daddy Warbucks, but because I genuinely want to take advantage of my current situation and have a good time with the people.  It's kind of like my thoughts on the lottery--I don't know what I would do with the money, but I do know how I would split it up with my family and close friends.  It's no fun if you can't share it with your peeps!

So, I started things this year by offering to take the girl I was dating at the time on a trip of her choice--I'LL BUY THE PLANE TICKET.  Seriously, you pick.  Thinking that this was a nice gesture, I told her to pick five places where she might want to go, and that all she had to pay for was part of the hotel cost.  She ended this conversation with "So, do I get veto power to cancel this trip if necessary?"

Not surprisingly, the relationship ended a few weeks later.

Not a problem, I thought--my recent good fortune will still allow me to do a trip later.  In the meantime, I will ask friends to join up with me to enjoy free movie passes, since I come into contact with many a freebie on the local movie circuit.  Night after night, I am amazed that so many people I know look upon the free movie with scorn; just two weeks ago, I had a freebie to see "Mission: Impossible III", a movie that I assumed most folks would want to see or would see eventually...I called six people, all that lived close to the theater, and for a variety of reasons (only one of which was somewhat decent), all six shot it down.  Besides my friends Yac and Ross, no one I know seems to like the movie freebie, but it still doesn't stop me from asking people, often to be reminded that no one respects ten bucks any more.

Hey, people are busy; maybe I'll do a dinner party during the week.  I'll provide everything; seriously, all you need to do is show up.  Lots of folks shot the dinner party down, and admittedly, this is because I am a somewhat poor day-to-day planner--I come up with ideas not very far in advance, and if I don't get on your Blackberry calendar in time, it is likely that you have already made plans to watch "The West Wing" or something else terribly non-social.  We are older now and therefore, we don't need to see our friends as often, I guess.

I made a sale at work in mid-April that will gross $5,200 over six months.  (No, we don't make sales this big very often.)  I immediately decided after closing that deal that I wanted to take my ten teammates from work out to lunch.  Nothing fancy--hell, I would do Hamburger Hamlet.  Point is, I'M BUYING.  I was fired up, my teammates had been really supportive over the last few months, and I got to cherry pick those positions to make sales--dammit, I owed them something.  What happened next was straight comedy--I just picked a couple of restaurants, some folks said they didn't really love the food there, some said that they didn't have time that week to go to lunch, some folks said they didn't want to go without their normal lunchmates, etc.  I finally said fuck it and brought in cookies from Potbelly for the team.

So, my brother and I thought, "Hey, maybe we could go out and do some free."  So, in what has to be the area's best deal, Home Nightclub (now, Home Ultra Bar) has removed their cover charge--once $15 to get in, now it's FREE--and they have an open bar from 9-11 PM on Friday and Saturday nights.  And we know the DJ.  And, for my money, the hottest sights in DC strolled through on a recent Saturday, as men and women were looking GOOD in da club.  Thinking this was a no-brainer--free drinks and a legitimate club with no entry charge--I called up about a dozen people.  I couldn't even drag some of them off the couch, and it was 75° that night.  Maybe free booze (or nearly free, since "open bar" means dollar drinks at Home) really does suck after all.

The one shining moment during this Free Campaign was when I convinced the folks from the inner circle--Jellybean, The Wife, The Professional, Chuck & T, D-Bell--to go out to dinner at Maggiano's, a truly magnificent family-style meal that left all of us in pain.  It was great and it was made more beautiful because everyone there really loves free (maybe nobody more than Jellybean, the guy SAVORS free) and I was really excited to take the folks out.

My brother and I talked about free on the way home from that dinner, barely able to speak because we had loaded up on too much lasagna and gnocchi; Dave is big on not owing people anything, so he had initially not wanted to take me up on the meal because he didn't want to feel like he would owe me dinner.  Valid, I thought, but in practice, not true.  He also thought that some folks were uncomfortable with free because they didn't want to seem like they are taking advantage of free, which again might be valid but given my current situation and how hard I sold the free meal, I didn't think that was on the minds of those that came along.

But then I started asking more people about why free gets no love these days from folks I know, and the picture became more and more clear.  I ran this by the Oracle, Dave Lee, and he suggested that people in our upper-middle-class strata don't take up free because they don't want to bother with taking my free; they'll just buy the $9 movie ticket, the $30 dinner or the $500 plane ticket on their own.  Possible.  Dave also suggested--wisely--that some of this has to be that people don't like me, and you have to just accept that as a reality if this many people say Fuck You to your offer of free.  When I mentioned that I had offered to buy a couple of friends who didn't have jobs plane tickets to vacation in Reykjavik, Dave thought that those people were either insane (probable) or they thought I might be leaning towards, ahem, something else, which I shot down as nonsense but realized that's all in the eye of the beholder.

My friend Danielle--as well as The Professional, Katie G., and a couple of her friends at a separate house party--all thought that free is beginning to lose its luster as we move into true adulthood, 30+.  When we were just out of college, free was the hottest action in town; how could I mooch my next meal?  I still remember waiting around meeting rooms around the lunch hour to see if any Workroom Scraps were lying around; one last scoop of salad, one more bag of pretzels, one more slice of lukewarm pizza.  (Okay, you got me--I still do that.)  If somebody said they were buying a round of drinks, I might actually pipe up and say I wanted one.  If someone had an extra ticket to an MLS game or a Pixies concert or something else I normally wouldn't care to watch, dammit, I was there.  Free meant something.

As someone that didn't grow up living on Easy Street, maybe my lifelong situational cost valuation has become a problem because I'm still stuck on thinking like I don't have any money.  I still leave sporting events angry if I paid a lot of money to go and the experience wasn't worthwhile; that was good money I just spent to watch the 'Skins win 45-0 in a laugher.  If I pay $50 to see Chris Rock, he better be on top of his game.  $100 for Madonna is cool...IF she puts on a good show.  I've got no problem dropping a grand to go to SoBe--guaranteed good time--but $5 for a milkshake?  That better be a damned good milkshake.

It's a good problem to have, I think--cost-effectiveness--and one that still leads me to cut coupons on Sundays, or buy one, get one, or to be the guy that almost always buys the knockoff cereal (Mmm...Honey and Nut Tasteeos!!  Mmm....Krispy Rice!!) at your local supermarket.  Within all of this, the offer of free just can't be beat--something for absolutely nothing.  Free just tastes better; it just feels right.  Come on, a massage is nice, but a FREE massage?  Oh goodness, you could soak that up all night.  When you're at that power lunch at Morton's (thanks, Mr. Corporation), doesn't the steak just taste fantastic?  When you stroll into a free movie, don't you just feel like walking out if it's no good?  Shit, it's not like you paid anything for it, right?

Embrace free.  Give free a chance.  Don't turn free away at the door.  Invite it inside, let it hang out on your couch for a while.  Free, dammit.  Make it the new black!

 

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell & Longer Community Trust:

• Super Saturdays at Putt-Putt Golf & Games--$6 for all-you-can-golf, a hot dog, a soda, and $4 in game tokens:  Opening Weekend

• Wednesday nights at Hard Times or Tuesday nights at Maarten's--half-price wings:  $9.50 Show

• Pizza Hut Buffet--buy five, get one free:  Matinee

• Little Caesar's--buy three pizzas for $10:  Rental

• Third Edition: $3 cover charge, no dance floor, shitty drinks, shittier crowd:  Hard Vice

 

justin@bellviewmovies.com