My patents liked to travel and eat out when we were young. If traveling, it meant we ate with them. I frequently remember eating at very fancy places wearing my little dresses and patent leather shoes and feeling very out of place. But mostly because I was a kid.

Also maybe the one time we flew first class at 14? Oooo they had ice cream!! In real bowls!!! And nice pillows!!!

One of the events that comes to mind was a “open” conference at a university that “actively encouraged” “low class” participation. (They didn’t say this).

What I mean by that is that it happened during normal work hours and you had to send an email to sign up, but they did allow you to come.

Over the course of the event it became clear that it was a joint PR thing for the sponsors and the university to appear to be “doing something about [issue]”, so they had 2 talks, an audience participation thing, where it was very clear that the thing needed most was more funding for people and work material and tools (think PPE, it wasn’t that or that critical). …and a panel discussion between [company] and [5 politicians] that in absolutely no way addressed the issues that were brought up in the audience participation part.

There was very nice, expensive catering.

Pretty surreal experience and something that solidified my belief that some very important parts of our society are utterly broken beyond repair.

I worked at a financial company which had an office in London, I am an IT guy and was asked to go to the London office a few times.

Two of those times I got to stay at The Langham.

It is a far more luxurious hotel than I have ever stayed at before.

Some of the tax firms my wife has worked for have hosted extravagant Christmas parties in mountain-top restaurants in Banff and the like. We get to pretend we’re fancy people and order the most expensive menu items for a night.

One time I went to the restaurant DAMON BAEHREL. I was informed afterwards that it had a 10-year waiting list and only seated 100 people a month. Despite having regularly commuted between the Midwest and the East Coast, getting there felt like the longest road trip I’ve ever taken since I had to go with my mother-in-law and some of it is on a gravel road.

I had to Google DAMON BAEHREL to spell it and I’m not going to bother retyping it.

It was far and away the most pretentious, absurd, cartoonishly fancy experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve dressed up in antique ceremonial Moroccan robes for a banquet at the art museum in the city I grew up in. At the art museum I sat next to the mayor’s mother in a room of 200 people conversely, about 30 people total could fit into DAMON BAEHREL.

I thought the art museum banquet was fancy, but when I was little I thought Boston Market and IBC root beer were fancy.

DAMON BAEHREL was the kind of place that serves a dozen ‘courses’ but each one is like one cracker one sliver of cheese and one spritz of condiment with maybe a sliver of sausage made from some bespoke farm animal. He insisted that the water we were drinking was actually unreduced tree sap. Everything was served on various slabs of wood some with the bark still on it. The slabs were so much larger than the food It looked like putting a coin on a serving platter for each course.

I just felt embarrassed every time I looked at the Damon and his staff. They had clearly heard his bullshit so many times that it was hard for them to feign credulity anymore.

Anyway, that shit was way too fancy for me. Clearly it was just wasted on me.

I went with a friend to Vegas. He was going to one of those super-posh conferences for his line of work, and just casually wanted to split the hotel bill (because he’s cheap; the dude could afford to live in one of those hotels year round). At the end of the conference, all of his colleagues were throwing some party at the top of one of the hotels on the strip. He helped me through the security screen and we left the elevator. We went from a world of bright lights and gaudiness to dark passion and sultry beats where each seat at their reclined cushion alcoves was worth thousands of dollars. Prostitution may be illegal in Vegas, technically, but escorts that looked like world-famous supermodels (male and female, to be clear) were writhing across every lap at those recessed tables.

My friend got me to the balcony, where I got a picture of the entire strip at night. Then my friend casually mentioned that getting a drink would be about $1200 and we went back down to the normal floors for the free booze and $2 blackjack.

Honestly, where I live now.

I rent a bare-bones townhouse. Two rooms, and a basement with an old washer and dryer, and a small garage.

I have always lived in apartments, sometimes with fewer rooms than people. Having an entire place of my own (that’s not a studio apartment) is sometimes unbelievable to me. A washer and dryer downstairs? No quarters? I don’t have to look for a spot, I have a garage? I don’t have to cram my entire life in one room, I have an “office!?” This will likely be the closest to “home owner” I’ll get and it still feels unreal after almost two years here. It’s certainly not going into anyone’s Pinterest board, and there are issues, but I always feel “bougie” when I open the garage 🤣

I got very randomly bumped up to first class on a transatlantic flight for business. I do not travel much for business, especially internationally. So, I definitely should not have had priority over more regular accounts. I have to assume I just got lucky, and that flight happened to have no frequent flyers.

It was an eye opening experience. I got to hang out in a secret lounge. When my flight was ready to board, multiple staff escorted us to the gate. When we landed, we took a private van to a secret side entrance, which had its own first class only passport check. We were brought to another secret first class lounge through hidden back hallways to wait for our connections. The lounge looked down over the terminal, and the exit was a nondescript door you’d assume was a maintenance entrance.

Being around that level of service and the other people in first class, it’s clear the wealthy live in another world. I looked up how much that ticket normally goes for after, and full price is for many people a yearly salary. It was nice, but it seems like a crazy way to divide resources.

I grew up very poor, but my mom’s childhood friend was well off and had rich friends. I would stay with him a lot so his kid and I were like family to each other. A rich “daddy’s girl” friend of his, who I had only met once or twice before, apparently had a crush on me and sent me a formal invite to her quinceañera (sorry if misspelled) with all expenses paid. On the weekend of the party they had a black car pick me up from school (Friday after last bell). It drove me to a shop where I was fitted for a suit, then a stylist for a haircut and my first manicure, then taken back home. The next morning (Saturday) I was picked up from home and taken to the local airport where a private jet was waiting for me and the new suit was already in its coat closet. I was flown to Miami and put up in what seemed like a really nice hotel. The party was glitz. Everyone, including myself, was wearing something that cost thousands of dollars. Definitely no rented suits there. The next day, I was flown and driven back home. After going through all of that, I spent literally five seconds with the birthday girl during the party before she was whisked away and I didn’t see her again.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It was a surreal experience.

EDIT: As an adult I have had many situations that qualify for this post, but I never felt as out of place as I did that one time.

I was tier one help desk, overnight, in a children’s hospital.

I had a doctor call me, who expressly made it clear he didn’t want a run around, while manually palpating a child’s heart to keep it in rhythm and thus, the child alive.

I told him there are back ups upon back ups that can be implemented, and I am happy to talk about his computer problem when the patient is SAFE. Not a little, “we got this,” safe, but SAFE.

Tier one help desk, overnight, no support, and I had to tell a person who turned out to be a board member that he could go fuck himself on his computer problem until the child patient was safe.

My first job was customer service, and I’ve been in IT for a dozen years. Its still customer service. You just have to realize who the customer is - in the case of a children’s hospital, it is always the child.

Spent a night at the Iceland Blue Lagoon Retreat hotel for a special occasion. It’s like $1800 USD per night so it was a huge splurge. We saw Rebel Wilson staying at the hotel too. It was fancy AF.

Absolutely wasted if you only spend one day, but we couldn’t afford 2.

My dad once told me how he won a bunch of money betting on a horse race and spent it all that night in the fancy suite type area that overlooked the racetrack.

A girl I dated was friends with the daughter of one of Microsoft’s founders and we got invited to their house to watch Seafair. I think it’s be safe to call in a small mansion right on the water with a dock. The kitchen was as big as my whole apartment. The technology was a bit dated but must’ve been state of the art when it was built. Switches for automated everything. On the water we had front row seats to the Blue Angels. They are incredibly loud up close.

The guy was super down to earth. Had a good conversation where he showed genuine interest in me and what I did. 9.9/10, the hot tub was broken

I got invited to some sort of literary award ceremony at the French embassy a few years back. I, uh, severely underdressed for the occasion. I got the invite for participating in the Albertine book store’s bookclub, and for whatever reason, my brain went, “I can show up to this like I would dress for a bookclub session, it’s the same people.” Spoiler, it was not, and I really should have been at least in a button up and slacks, rather than my hoodie and jeans. As luck would have it, the gentleman who won the award, Emmanuel Dongala, was sat next to me during the speeches. I can still remember the look of “What the classless, American fuck is this guy doing?” as he took his seat next to me.

On the other hand, I went to my first opera at the NY Metropolitan Opera last year basically dressed the same way, and it was surprisingly entirely fine. Turns out, very few people want to be sat for hours in formal attire when hardly anyone can see you in the dark, anyway.

Not work related, but I used to do pickup games with the players on the best Tribes Ascend team in the world every day!