People, Places and Things

I spent much of my past week in Fredericton, New Brunswick on a work-related trip. It was filled with warm hearted people, beautiful places and thought-provoking things. At the end of the day, Fredericton isn't that different from Toronto, it's also filled with people, places and things but for some reason, I had more time to observe them, listen to them and learn from them.

Yesterday, Susan (a friend of mine from Fredericton) & I went to the airport a couple hours before my flight to drop off two participants from the conference we were at. A couple things you should know about Susan: she's an extremely kind, loving and intelligent woman and a couple things you should know about me: I study Economics and I like talking about it with people who don't study it more than people who do (I end up learning more). After dropping the participants off at the airport, on our way back to the car in the parking lot, Susan mentioned how often she comes to the airport. She wasn't kidding; when we were walking through the airport earlier, she had greeted pretty much the entire airport staff from the woman working at the cafeteria to the person working behind the Air Canada check-in counter.

That was Susan. She greets everyone with a smile and isn't afraid to get to know someone. I spent four days with her in her hometown and witnessed the incredible relationships she had built in her life. My economist brain started thinking and realized that the way our breed invests in stocks and bonds, she naturally invested in her relationships, all the time, every single day.The returns on her investments were evident.

Back to the airport conversation, she mentioned how the airport had recently installed an automated parking gate and had let go of the person working there. She said she missed him but more than that, she couldn't understand why did the airport let him go? Where does that job go? It hit me then: this was a conversation between two particular people (Susan and Romil) at a particular place (Fredericton airport) about a particular thing (automated parking gate) but when you think about it, these questions are asked worldwide everyday just by different people in different places about different things.

I gave her the answer my economics education gives me:

When the airport saves money on wages, they use it to for cheaper services, higher wages for other employees, or increase the profits of its shareholders. Someone somewhere ends up with more money in their pocket than before.  With this extra money, people buy things in other places which keeps the economy going. It's a giant cycling chain; we see only one side of it (the automated parking gate) but not the other side of the story.

She took a moment and said:

Well, that makes sense but when you know the person working behind the parking booth, it's more difficult. When you realize that a few months later, he still doesn't have a job, it's frustrating. There are only 350,000 people in this entire province [New Brunswick]. There simply aren't enough jobs to go around and when companies take these kind of jobs away which we know won't come back to the province, it's hard. We don't see the automated parking gate as progress, at all.

Of course, she was right. It made me think about all the little towns across the world that depend on these kinds of jobs. Yes, someone somewhere is saving money, but what about the person who lost the job? What about the relationships he had at his work with people like Susan? Yes, the giant cycling chain we call the economy will keep turning and keep us "progressing", but at what costs?

And I guess that's one of the things I learned this week: All peoples, places and things have a story to tell. Listen close before it's too late.