extract from MakerMeeter; GKnapton
Pan was a bin dipper.
He loved watching old films about the California Gold Rush of 1849 where three generations of entire families upped sticks and trekked for days across the American plains, leaving everything behind. A sign hung on the outside of the door of the old house simply read "Gone west".
Those guys were able to simply re-write their lives from the bottom up. Down to every last detail. No fear. As brave as children, only adults.
Men, women and children would shovel dirt out of the ground onto a sieve pan and then finger through it for the prize that made it all worthwhile. It was a feast or famine game. You either struck gold or starved to death.
Pan liked the images of those early slag heaps. The residue of panning for gold.
When the gold ran out the temptation just ran on and on. Afterall, no one knew it had run out. They didn't have the technology we possess today. The only way you knew the gold had gone was to keep panning.
When they were sure the area was "dry" they'd pick a new spot and start all over. And years later, decades later, ever since, new jacks have been panning for glory in vain.
The vainglory of a shiny metal never seemed so apparent.
Pan loved the story of the panners.
A hundred and fifty years later a guy from England went to Cally to prospect. Everyone was in stitches. Ridiculing him. Like, yeah you're really gonna strike it lucky when the whole world and his mum have come up dry ever since those Wild West boys downed tools and beat a hasty retreat back to civilisation all those years ago.
There's no where left to prospect!
But this guy had a plan. You see, everyone prior had been panning with their hands, not with their heads.
He quickly came back laden with gold. He didn't even have to work too hard to reach it. Literally a millionaire a hundred times over, virtually over night.
See, nobody thought to pan the slag heaps of the first arrivals. Until now. It turns out that in times of plenty, we throw away an awful lot of good stuff. Stuff which, in harder times, wouldn't ever be thrown out in the first place. That goes for life in general not just gold prospectors.
This new guy's panning slag and coming up trumps. All you need is the brains and the audacity. Think first, go searching second. It seems everyone else forgot the first step and just went searching blind. But as Pan often said "there's none so blind as the man that will not see".
In this case, no one saw the sheer value in the rubbish of their predecessors. Go dipping your fingers through the rubbish of your contemporaries and you'll look crazy. You may even be a little crazy. Yet go dipping through the bins of yesteryear and you're a clever man. You're an entrepreneur of distinction.
Pan liked this learning. He liked it a lot.
He got to thinking, and soon realised that today's gold is information. Dirt. And that with dirt, the time rule doesn't apply. But the other parallels with Cally are good. For example, people throw out "gold" in times of plenty. At other times, all that gets chucked is garbage.
Now, Pan gets to thinking a little more. The way he sees it, the only people who live permanently in the good times are the rich and famous. So you can bet that the rich and famous are always creating slag heaps of significant value. Or you might say, whereas the average guys bin is just full of rubbish, the bins of the rich and famous will be full of dirt. And dirt is gold, since gold is dirt, in today's parlance.
Pan was a bin dipper. And I bet when you read that sentence right now you're feeling entirely different about Pan than when you read that sentence at the top of this chapter.
You see, that's what I like to call "perception deficit". There's a country mile between the way you see things and the way things are.
And that's just the way things are.
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