Yinchuan is not Shanghai. Here, running into a fellow Westerner counts as a stroke of luck.
And I’m a lucky man. My phone has been stolen three times. My laptop once.
And so mischievous karma took pity and sent me a weekend drinking buddy of pure-blooded German stock.
Ideally he’d have been a weekday one too. But a man has to work. He has a family, a house, taxes. All the things that distract us from status.
At this point you may reasonably ask: what’s our Bundes-Felix got to do with anything? Why isn’t he on my other channel, where he’d fit the format?
Keep your hair on, I’ll explain.
Felix is a status chaser of the healthy variety. An example to the young, an amusement to the old.
On average, he spends four months a year on business trips.
He started collecting statuses back when Angela was still shining in the Reichstag. Then he saw the light. Realised it was all self-deception.
He believes it isn’t us who have the statuses, it’s the statuses that have us. Marketing and all that (hello, Anton Kuznetsov π).
After which he renounced it all and took holy orders as a status monk.
I must say, I respect the decision. I’m always behind a considered move, as WaΕΔsa was behind the trade unions.
But his enlightened takes simply don’t square with my status obsessions.
Anyone who has dealt with proper old-school Germans knows they don’t care to chit-chat about euros.
But the setting was conducive. After the fifth round, we’d moved on to status maths puzzles at Olympiad level.
Serve number eins: my mates rang their mates and, as mates do, wangled a mates’ rate at Hyatt.
We compared. He turned out to be on a regular suite rate at eighty dollars. Booked on the Hyatt website, no Chinese mates of mates involved.
So in effect he pays exactly double my price for the room. And he doesn’t get a top suite with a panoramic view, like mine.
His appeal β that his rate includes breakfast, laundry tokens and a couple more equally cheap arguments β didn’t even make it past the status court of first instance.
Serve number zwei: he stopped collecting points, because it’s all the work of the status devil. Now he chooses hotels as he pleases, rather than dancing a polka to the hotel chains’ trombone.
My observations that he’s still staying and paying anyway were rejected. I put his reasoning down to alcohol-induced befuddlement.
Right then. This and that. Banged our statuses on the table. Kept pouring.
Serve number drei: “repent, thou lost status chaser, and a rich choice shall be thine” set off uncontrollable drunken giggling.
Draw your own conclusions. You can even do it in the comments.
P.S. Joking aside, I learned a lot about German tax law for business travellers. There’s a fair bit of achtung-achtung and oversight there, frankly. But I won’t go into detail on this channel. Better to write straight to the Finanzamt. They’re very understanding about stories like this. Sometimes they’ll even share a penny they’ve recovered from the rascal π
