OKAY, SO YOU’VE WON THE LOTTERY
DO YOU STILL GO TO WORK?
W
hat would you do if you hit the EuroMillions jackpot? Buy a Rolls Royce? A mansion? A life in the sun? How much spending can you do before it just gets a bit… boring?
There are people out there who would scoop the big prize on Saturday and faithfully report for duty on Monday. Would you?
Because it must get boring sooner or later. You see it all the time with the super-rich. They run out of ideas. One yacht isn’t big enough, so they buy another. The sea isn’t big enough, so they blast into space. Bezos, Musk, and Branson are all chasing their rich-fix amongst the stars these days. Wouldn’t life be easier if, like you and me, they could get the same thrill from a two-forone deal on Ben and Jerry’s?
Possibly you’d have a long holiday, sail around the Med, and buy a penthouse apartment in Mayfair to store all your shopping from Selfridges.
Let’s be honest, probably not.
BUT SURELY, AT SOME POINT, YOU WOULD FIND YOURSELF IDLY STARING INTO YOUR COCKTAIL GLASS, SWIRLING IT AROUND, AND MISSING THE CUT AND THRUST OF FRONTLINE SOCIAL WORK.
But the real question is this: if you were financially set for life, would you still Our jobs may be exhausting, but come to work? I’ll give you a moment to they’re also satisfying. If you can wipe away the tea you’ve just spat out. forget all the paperwork, bureaucracy,
timescales, targets, and hefty layers of managerialism that suffocate the life from our profession. If you can heave all that to one side, beneath it you will find the pure beating heart of real social work. Those moments when you genuinely feel like you make a difference. And those moments are priceless. Best of all, if your numbers did come up, I guess you could forget all the managerialism. After all, how can anyone manage a lottery winner? You can’t threaten them, they’d just leave – or buy the whole company and sack you. A private individual can’t really buy a local authority, or course, but it would surely make a difference knowing they could walk out the door at any moment and into the back of a Bentley.
