A Parable for our Times?

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A Parable for our Times?

juicy ripe tomatoes If you sometimes feel like a slave to the ever-increasing demands of email, this story’s for you:

About this time last summer, Joan, a woman in a small Midwestern US city, lost her file clerk’s job. Widowed and with an infant child, she quickly ran through her savings while looking for work. Prospects were bleak. Wherever Joan showed up for one of the few jobs available…well, so did hundreds of other desperate applicants.

Finally, down to her last $10, Joan applied for a night-shift cleaning job at the Acme Office Building downtown. The Human Resources assistant agreed to hire her, but changed his mind after learning that Joan had no phone or email address. Joan explained that not having a phone was temporary; as soon as she could afford the monthly fee she would have one again. As for the computer, she’d been forced to sell it for the money and couldn’t afford Internet cafés more than twice a month to check her email. But the young assistant—who’d had his own email address since age 6—was suspicious of someone without one. To him, the lack of an email address was akin to not having fingerprints.

Joan left the interview in despair. She took that last $10 out of her wallet and stared at it for a long, long time. Should she hoard it? Or should she throw caution to the wind and try an idea she’d been nursing for a while?
The next morning—at dawn—Joan walked 3 miles to the city’s produce distribution center and plunked down that last $10 for 10 pounds of beautiful, ripe tomatoes from regional farms. Then she walked 3 miles in a different direction to one of the city’s most upscale neighbhorhoods. Walking door to door, she sold the tomatoes in about an hour—at three times what she’d paid for them. She did the same thing the next day, and the next, and the next after that. By the end of the week she had pulled together half the next month’s rent and was able to have her phone turned back on
The next week, Joan hired an out-of-work friend to help her. They walked together to the produce market, and between them carried away 25 pounds of tomatoes each day, as well as a few pounds of peaches. The week after that she had two people working for her, selling 40 pounds of produce daily. When she bought three inexpensive hand-pull wagons to haul their produce in different neighborhoods, sales doubled, and then tripled. Before long she could buy a battered but well-maintained pickup truck, and she began dealing in hundreds of pounds of produce, brought directly to people’s homes.

The city newspaper wrote an article about Joan entitled “From the Brink of Poverty,” and she developed more customers. A few people with disabilities asked her to deliver groceries along with produce, and soon Joan had a small-but-thriving side business. She started selling from a temporary stand at the farmer’s market, and a few months later agreed to share one of the permanent stands with a woman who sold honey.

And so it went…

Last winter, six months into her surprising success, Joan paused to take a breath and consider her future options. One thing she needed, she felt, was life insurance—enough to care for her child just in case something should happen to Joan. She called an insurance adviser, who recommended various plans to suit her new circumstances. He asked for her email address to forward appropriate documents.

Joan laughed. “I don’t have one,” she said. “I keep meaning to buy a computer and get back into all of that, but really—this has been a whirlwind. I just haven’t had time.”

The insurance adviser was stunned. “I can’t believe you’ve managed to do everything you’ve done without a computer!” he exclaimed. “Without using the Internet? Without having an email address? If you’d had access to all of that, just imagine where you might be now!”

“Oh, I can imagine,” Joan said. She laughed again. “If I’d had access to all of that I know exactly where I’d be—on my hands and knees as a cleaning lady at the Acme Office Building!”

The Moral of Joan’s Story: Just because you’re on the pathway to success doesn’t mean your life needs to be ruled by the Internet or email. Keep technology in perspective.

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© Suzanne Rodriguez
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