[TP]

Now, I'm sure this will provoke a bit of emotive response but we'll see what happens .....

Now, I'm not the worlds best orator, nor do I write the worlds best documentation. I am known to be direct (despite fil2 thinking I was 50 years old from how I come across on the board!!!! I'm 29 damn it! 29!) so I'll just say what I'm thinking. I mean no offence to anyone via this post, I'm just trying to open up a discussion on an issue that I find myself divided on.

I've noticed over the last few months that there is a distinct dislike/bias from people who position themselves as not having much money compared to this who do have more disposable income. Desmo Due has highlighted this somewhat and so has my time on some other forums - non DSC. Why is this so? Why can there be such a hang-up about this? There doesn't seem to be such a big deal made of this in Aus as there is here - is it a hangover of the English classes or is it still alive and well?

Do we get too hung up on this? Does it really matter if one person has more disposable income than someone else? On one thread there seemed to be an attitude from some members that if you didn't do the work yourself and just paid for something to be done on your bike then you were a bling merchant and you didn't have the credibility that you would otherwise have had through personal graft.

Why am I divided? Well, I joined the Aus Army when I was 16 as an electronics apprentice. So that means I didn't finish high school, never went to University etc. Although thats not entirely true, I started doing my MBA last year but couldn't afford the time it was taking. I've done component level repair on cryptographic devices and operated HF, VHF and satellite systems bearers in telecommunications. I then moved into IT and was self taught before leaving the Army with nearly 7 years service under my belt. I did a lot of things myself and was fairly enterprising in what I would do for myself - BUT, I had feck all money. I was married with children a at a very yound age and we had bugger all. After leaving the Army and going into private enterprise in IT I started to lose my time. I earned more money but lost a lot of personal time because of it. Especially with the studying which is neverending in IT - Microsoft release a new operating system every 15 minutes and change their deployment strategy every 5 minutes. This leaves me with less time to do the things I'd like to be able to do and things that I used to get that sense of satisfaction you get from doing the job right yourself (having said that I can get that satisfaction from work, just not as often due to office politics and other crapola).

The flip side to this is that I now have a larger disposable income than I had before. Which means that although I have less time than I used to (my first year at BP I averaged a 59.6 billable hours a week over the 52 weeks despite the holiday's, although this has tailed off since about July last year) I can choose to spend the time I have left the way I want to - with my wife/children, playing sport, with the bike rather than anything else. Probably easier for me to explain that I now value my time more than money.

Does this make me a bad person? Am I now a bling merchant because I have a cleaner who comes to the house and because I get the majority of my bike work done by someone other than myself? Because I can afford to buy a 620 instead of a 600 for Desmo Due? Because I would big-bore the 620 if there was no gentlemans agreement? Because I can afford to have someone do the majority of prep-work for me on the bike? Because I own two Ducati's now, a van and the family car?

You tell me?

I can see both sides of the situation but for me, the overriding principle is that everyone is in a different situation and that people's situations are always evolving. My personal situation has changed dramatically over the last 10 years (my 10th wedding anniversary in November!) and anyone else's could.

Do you feel it's justified to complain because you have no money and someone else has? Perhaps you feel justified to complain about people having no money when they could do something about it and get more?

As I said at the top of this post, I don't mean to offend any individual on this board I'm merely putting this up for debate.

What say you - the DSC masses?