Benjamin hates Wednesday afternoons. Every Wednesday after school he is heading over to the Mullers where he has to stay at Chris’ disposal for two hours. Mostly Chris is offloading duties assigned to him by his mother. But sometimes if there are no such tasks to keep Benjamin busy for two hours he might just have him walk around the block until the two hours are completed. Today he will be going over to the Mullers for the tenth time. Benjamnin thinks it is a akward coincicence that he will be there for the tenth time and still it will only be a tenth of his obligation that will then be fullfilled. Still he would consider himself lucky compared to Kevin because Kevin has to be at Chris’ disposal for four hours every Saturday afternoon for ninety times. But at times Benjamin, nevertheless, asks himself if his deal was just.
It all started with this one Monopoly game where they started to adjust the rules. The one where they started to allow lending to each other. During the course of that game it was Chris who would accumulate all the wealth while Benjamin and Kevin would pile up more debt with every roll of the dice. Needless to say that Chris enjoyed the game. Whenever Benjamn or Kevin suggested to stop playing Chris would deny the request. To terminate the game they would have to pay back their debt he would declare. Benjamin cannot recall who at some point suggested they should stop the game and work the debt of in real terms. It took a while to agree on a conversion rate, though. Benjmani’s debt amounted to one million while Kevin had piled up debt of 1.8 million. Chris initially suggested to convert the debt into work hours using the minimum wage rate of 7.25. Benjamin and Kevin were able to convince Chris that this was ridiculous as it would take them almost half a century to work of their debt. The fact that the game does not refer to a specific currency also provided some room for interpretation. After several rounds of negotiations they finally settled for a conversion of 5000 units of debt for one hour of work.
Yes, they have a deal but every Wednesday Benjamin feels that it was somehow not right to let debt accumulated in a game to be converted into real services and whether they should not just have refused to continue the game.
Bubble Kids (cont.)
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