The Pursuit of Happiness

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Among my regrets is advising a client who made doors and windows to modernize his factory. I told him to buy technology and machines to kick out “product” to meet European Union sizing standards. That would open up markets, primarily in Switzerland, for his doors and windows.

We were in the town of Gjakova, Kosovo, which had been ruthlessly bombed when Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians sought independence from Serbia. I was a fat American getting USAID money to give expert advice. He was an Albanian-Kosovar who’d lost his wife and a brother in a bombing raid; his business, a small company started by his great-grandfather, was also destroyed.

The war had been over for a couple of years, but Gjakova was still a mess. Dead buildings were piled into mass graves at the end of streets, and army jeeps – driven by Italian and German NATO personnel – patrolled the streets between the piles. The Italian soldiers were casually glamorous in sunglasses and flowing silk scarves. The Germans were grumpy and efficient and did the work.

The land around Gjakova is beautiful, primarily hills and valleys covered with chestnut trees interwoven into a network of fast running streams. I was reminded of the Ozarks when I looked at them.

My client, Melos – who’s now a friend – made his doors and windows out of those trees. Before the war, he and his brothers used hand tools to shape the chestnut into doors and windows for primarily local markets. Today, a kid with computer skills programs a chain of machines to plane, cut, assemble, and glue the doors and windows into precise sizes. Melos and his brothers feed the machines and load “product” into trucks.

“I’m making money,” Melos said, in a recent email, “and the Swiss are impressed. But I am a bit worried.

“You see,” he continued, “the machines are thinking for me. And I no longer talk to the wood, or feel it or smell it. I lift it and shove it around, and I have no idea what the computer is doing. I have made the trees into slaves, and myself one too.

“I miss thinking and feeling.”