Kerrie Murphy | July 08, 2008
THERE'S an old saying that you shouldn't judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes.
That's a nice theory, but shoes worn by other people are quite disgusting and most of us are reluctant to put our feet anywhere near them.
It's the reason that 10-pin bowling and rinks, be they ice or roller, are not more dominant forms of entertainment these days.
Can you really understand a person just by walking in their shoes? All you really know is whether they have blisters or are in need of one of the many fine foot deodorants on the market.
Perhaps blisters explain a cantankerous world view.
But then, that saying is said to have originated from Native American cultures, so they were just working with the material they had at the time.
There was no point saying: "Don't judge a person until you've driven a nautical mile on their jet-ski and watched The Green Mile on their flatscreen television," because Tom Hanks hadn't even been born when the saying was coined.
But these items are apparently what passes for a life these days, at least as far as eBay is concerned. By now you've probably heard about Ian Usher, the Perth man whose marriage broke up, so he put his entire life (his house, cars, clothes, a trial period at his job and an introduction to his friends, everything but his passport) on eBay in one job lot.
Apparently Usher was confused about the part where you're supposed to sell all your ex's stuff and use their phone to call premium numbers so they get a huge bill, or drive past their house in the middle of the night and yell "jerk" out the window.
In the end, Usher's life sold, for $399,300, less than the $500,000 or so he thought it was worth, which goes to show, you should never throw out this sort of challenge - value me - unless you know for certain the answer you'll receive.
It must have been a tad crushing to discover that your life isn't worth what you thought it was. And dangerous for a person with all that money - they may blow it all on booze, KFC and Tim-Tams as they cry that no one understands them and that after they've gone everyone will realise how awesome they were and then people will be sorry. At this point, their words would probably become inaudible except for the word penguin.
But it wasn't really Usher's life, was it? It's not as if you could buy that really embarrassing memory of something that happened when he was five, but still causes waves of mortification 39 years later. That's probably just as well, because we all have enough of those already. Any more and we'd be so depressed we'd have to put our life up for auction.
What people were bidding on was his lifestyle, and no disrespect to Usher (he had some pretty nice-looking stuff) but who wants to swap their ordinary existence for someone else's?
If you're going to buy a lifestyle it should be awesomely exciting. Get back to Defrag when J. K. Rowling puts her life on the block. But we'd still want to keep our own shoes.
TOP 10 READERS POLL
This week:
The top 10 things on Bill Gates' to-do list now that he has left Microsoft.
10. Perfect his secret island lair and get a white cat to stroke.
9. Build a bug-free, patch-free and virus-resistant program.
8. Reboot himself.
7. Start answering all those billg@microsoft.com emails.
6. Re-create his $US113 million estate on the east coast of the US (presently in Washington state) to enable geographical redundancy.
5. Spend time figuring out exactly how to make Windows Vista work.
4. Buy Zimbabwe and arrange outplacement counselling for Robert Mugabe.
3. Start work on the personal to-do list he wrote in 1964.
2. Wash his pullover.
1. Check the actual amount earned whilst bending to pick up a $100 note.
Contributors: Graham Wilcox, Buz, John Lilley, Don Knowles, Stewart Walker, Squarepeg, Meagan Moloney, Dave Burton, Ray Quinn.
Next week:
A survey by Travelodge in Britain finds that techies get less sleep than most other professions. Send us the top 10 signs a techie is too tired. Answers by Thursday to OzDefrag@Gmail.com