[ryandrake]

My guess is that he had assistants to do those mundane things for him like purchasing his personal phone and making sure the bills were paid.

I'm reminded of the time back in the early 90s when president Bush (Sr.) was amazed at grocery store technology, having likely never shopped for his own groceries for decades [1]. It was really embarrassing and highlighted how he struggled with relating to common people. Executives who live lives of privilege like this need to recognize that their lifestyle is a potential blind spot. Anyone who has worked in a company where the rich top brass made all the product decisions (instead of the lower-level normals) knows what I'm talking about.

1: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/05/us/bush-encounters-the-sup...

[no_wave]

The Bush thing is almost certainly a fake story. He was playing along with being impressed by some new UPC code reader technology that was being demonstrated that could read damaged UPCs.

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/bushscanner.asp

[flubert]

Snopes rates that story as false:

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/bushscanner.asp

[ryandrake]

Hmm, interesting read, thanks. Fooled me. I still stick to the overarching point about it being a potential blind spot. Even if the Bush example is false I've known lower-profile wealthy/privileged people who were totally out of touch with the needs of regular people.

[no_wave]

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately? See what they charge for arugula?”

[ghaff]

I gather, as someone else noted, the Bush thing may have been a fake story. But I remember at least one other time when some presidential candidate or other (maybe a Bush) didn't really know the price of a dozen eggs or a gallon on milk. Why would they?

And, over the years, I've seen companies make various decisions with respect to paycheck timing and other similar administrative details for various reasons including greater consistency across the company. And there's often a hue and cry, some of it from lower paid employees who are genuinely inconvenienced by the change. And I'd be willing to bet that, in just about every case, the execs who made the decision didn't even stop to think that someone might care about minor cash flow changes.

[herge]

The more fun article is "When the elves leave middle-earth".

(Which is the HN equivalent of saying "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra")