Use it or lose it

People are full of parables and, really, they don’t get more annoying or tedious than those from east and south-east Asia. We were at a school event recently. It was a 6-hour festival of utter futility that happened to occur on our wedding anniversary. Six hours of non-celebration that I will never recover. And it included this little gem from the principal.

Once, there was a father with a son. He thought his son was rather spoilt and wanted to teach him the value of hard work. So, one morning, he said to his son, “You will not get any dinner tonight, unless you go to work and come back with one day’s wages.” His son cried, but the father remained firm and sent the son out of the house to find work.

Once the father’s back was turned, the mother called to her son and gave him a gold coin. “Go away for the rest of the day,” she told him, “and come back in the evening with the coin.” The son did as his mother told him and, at the end of the day, he came back with his coin. But his father knew that it had been given to him, so he threatened to throw the coin into the well. When the son didn’t object, the father did exactly that and sent the boy to bed hungry that night.

The next morning, the father repeated his edict. “You will not get any dinner tonight, unless you go to work and come back with one day’s wages.” This time it was the boy’s aunt who gave him a gold coin and the scene repeats itself with the father throwing the coin into the well.

On the third morning, after yet another repetition of the edict, the son actually did go out and do some back-breaking, incredibly tiring work. When he came back to the house at the end of the day, his father again threatened to throw the coin into the well but, this time, the son dropped to his knees and begged his father not to do it, telling him how hot, thirsty and exhausted he was, and what heavy work he had to do just to get that coin. And the father handed it back to his son and gave him his blessings, or something like that.

Assumed moral: Hard work makes you appreciate what you have more. Or, you only appreciate what you earn with hard work. Or something like that.

Alternative moral to J and I: If you can’t even pretend to have done some work, you deserve to lose your money.