Richard Littledale
Richard Littledale
radio microphone
BBC Radio 2Janice Long Show
Alex Lester Show
Pause for Thought
Richard Littledale: Series 11, Number 3
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Wednesday 30 September 2009

Picture this. Its just another day at the office working for a company who sell digital tracks on the internet. Its not terribly gripping, really. You insert the details, you add the price, you upload the lot, and then you move on to the next track. It's a bit like working on an old-fashioned production line really, except without the noise and the obligatory hair net.

All of which makes it really easy to slip into a routine where you don't notice what you are actually doing. This is how our particular employee made the mistake of a lifetime. Instead of offering the title track of a popular album for 29p, he offered the whole thing for 29p, with the result that sales of the album in question shot up by 380,000 percent in the few days it took for his bosses to notice.

The reason for the stampede was that no-one wants to miss a bargain. Credit crunch or not, we find it hard to resist any offer that makes us feel we are 'getting one over' on the system. I'm sure there were people who bought that particular album whether they like the artists or not - just for the joy of knowing that they got a good deal. Even those who don't regard themselves as savvy or shrewd soon find that hidden instincts kick in when they smell a profit in the air.

Jesus told a really weird story about a 'shrewd manager'. This man spent his days shaving bits off the bills owed to his employer, so that he made friends with the debtors. Then when the day came when he lost his job, he was owed lots of favours to help him out. Instead of saying to his listeners that "you should never behave like that", Jesus told his them to learn from the example. If he can do it for material gain, he said - what are you doing to do for things that really matter?

Sometimes we've got such an eye on the bargain that will save a few pence today, that we never really think about tomorrow, or the day after that. The trouble is, we could end up missing out on the greatest bargain of all that way. "Store up treasures in heaven" said Jesus - where their value will never decrease and they'll never rust away. For that matter, they'll never get sold off for 29p either!

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© BBC 2009
This talk by Richard Littledale was first broadcast as BBC Radio 2's night time "Pause for Thought"
at 01:30 during the Janice Long show and at 03:30 during the Alex Lester show.
It is reproduced here by permission of the BBC.