My Waste of a Life, According to a Guy Who I Didn’t Even Know but Thought It Was Okay to Tell Me on My Deck One Sunny Afternoon

When’s the last time someone came to your house, drank your beer, ate your snacks, and told you that your life was a waste?

Matt’s senior prom was this past Friday. He had a bunch of his friends over to take pictures in our back yard. And a few minutes before all of them were to arrive, Sheryl let me know that a bunch of their parents would be coming along, too. (You can imagine how charmed I was about that.)

While the prom goers mingled on our lower patio, their parents chatted up each other on our deck. Seemed pretty simple. It was a beautiful day, the weather was perfect, and we were heading into the golden hour. Instead, one of the kid’s dads gave me a golden shower.

As with all suburban parties in 2009, the talk turned to the economy. How bad the stock market is. Who’s to blame. One dad, who I didn’t know from Adam’s Off Ox, was really bent about it. He said the financial community were all criminals. That they wrecked everything. I tried to change the subject, because you can’t swing a stick in our neighborhood without hitting someone who’s in financial services. The conversation was getting a little…tense. So, I stepped in when he started talking about employee stock options.

Me: It’s funny, I spent a good chunk of my career doing global stock option implementations. Now, with what’s happening in the economy, I’m spending a lot of time getting them back from employees.

Him: See, you wasted your life. You haven’t done one thing to add value to the economy or society. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Me: Um…(glad I’m not 25 anymore, so thoughts of pushing him over the railing quickly subsided)…I have this house…I own these chairs…paid for these drinks… I poured what was left of my beer over the railing. A good friend of mine stared at me and was on the verge of laughing out loud.

Me (again): Well, this conversation is over. And this party’s over.

Those of you who know me know that I have a bad habit of doing this thing with my hands that I learned from Yul Brenner when he played Pharaoh in The Ten Commandments: I whisk people away when I’m mad. I did that. And the guy, along with his wife, got going.

To prove that I’m still a juvenile, I pointed out the back of his khakis to a friend of mine. Mr. You Wasted Your Life had been leaning against the railing of my deck for a while. The back of his pants were filthy. He used his butt to wipe a winter’s worth of grime from my deck railing.

I couldn’t stop laughing. The high school seniors were more mature than me. Then again, they have a whole life to waste ahead of them.