“Is your friend a king or something?”

I’m spending the next couple of days in Tampa for a work trip, and my friend’s friend, who lives in the area, invited me over for dinner with his wife, their one-year-old son and 13-year-old dog. It was a really enjoyable evening spent eating, catching up about life, and giggling with and kissing their incredibly enthusiastic and intelligent baby.

On the drive to Lutz, my Uber driver was talking about his life in Tampa, working as an IT worker, not making much money, but working as an Uber driver to earn extra income. We pulled into a gated community where my friend lives, and my driver had to not only get his face and driver’s license photographed, but he had to announce who he was, who he was seeing, and how long he intended on staying as my driver. When we arrived at my friend’s house, which in all honesty resembled a replica castle complete with a footbridge entrance over a moat, the driver exclaims, “Is your friend a king or something? This house is definitely something!” I thanked him for the ride, got out of his car, and immediately felt bad. He hated his job, didn’t think he earned enough money so took a second job as a driver, and had to drive me, some random tech girl on a business trip, to an area he was unfamiliar with to visit my friend and his castle. Great. I became so painfully aware of the separation between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, and my own privileges then.

My friend’s friend owns a video game company, so he is obsessed with all things gaming related. Each room of his house is themed after a different warrior, and his formal living room space has coats of armor and medieval style lights and tapestries. In the master bedroom, they have a large wooden axe that is mounted above their bed. Their mischievous one-year-old has unlocked every freaky thing in their house and has even climbed up the bed post in an attempt to get the axe. I wonder how they don’t think this entire house could potentially be a death trap of wooden axes and coats of armor and swords.

This friend told me that he bought this house during the economic downturn five years ago when no one was buying, and homes were being sold for less than 60 to 70 percent of their actual value. And because it was only partially finished, he got to custom design the undone spaces and rooms to his exact preferences. It’s his dream home at a fraction of what the real cost should have been.

“I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we’re really, really cheap,” my friend says while the three of us are enjoying ice cream in one of their common areas.

“Yeah, you can tell that to the Uber driver who took me here,” I responded, laughing. “He’ll really believe that!”

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