Thursday, 3 October 2013

Cheap Son of a Bitch


It seems as if I am always having trouble with my computer. I don’t know if I am actually having more trouble now than in the past or if I am noticing it more now. Maybe I am just spending more time “computing” than I ever did before. Maybe I should have bought an Apple product.

Every time I am in the position that I need a new computer, I decide that this time, I am going to buy a Macintosh computer. That is much like the decision almost everyone makes when they finish a move. “The next time we move, we are going to spend the extra money and have a company move us. We will just let them in, watch them box everything and load it onto a truck which will take our belongings to our new place where we will just direct the movers where to put everything.” I can’t tell you how many times I have said that. The only reason I can’t tell you is because I don’t remember exactly just how many times I have moved.

Of course the reason I don’t hire a moving company to move me is that they cost so much more than the do-it-yourself option. The same is true about buying a computer. Generally speaking, a Macintosh works out to almost twice the price of PC, and with the PC you get pretty much the same capabilities as the Mac has. The PC isn’t nearly as seamless as the Mac, but for $1000 or so I can put up with a little less seamlessness. Well, that is what I tell myself when everything is working fine, but when it isn’t I do wish I had spent the extra cash on the Mac.

I suppose that there are many instances of where I have opted to buy the better value over quality. I know that I can’t resist a three t-shirts for $10 deal when I am in Vegas. The shirts don’t look good for very long, but at that price it is cheaper than buying a bag of shop rags. I don’t buy bags of shop rags of course; I have all of these three dollar t-shirts clogging up my dresser. I’m a sucker for cheap tools as well. The way that I figure it is that for most tools, I am not working with them on a daily basis, but on a hit or miss, every couple of month’s usage. There are tools that need to be good quality. Pretty much any tool that needs to keep a sharp edge should be of the expensive variety. It’s true that you do get what you pay for. Sometimes I just don’t care if I get crap.

No matter how broke I am, I will always go to a good dentist. The pain and subsequent look of your teeth reflect that decision. The colour on one of the caps that I have in my mouth doesn’t match any of the other teeth that are there. I suspect that I said some disparaging remark to the dentist when he was picking the colour for the tooth. I learned that any criticism for your dentist should come AFTER all of the work is done and you have the bill in hand.

I had a friend that decided to go the dental school to get his work done to save a few bucks. The problem with a dental school is that what takes a regular dentist just a couple of appointments to do that root canal, in the school they are learning how to do it and spend far more time on it. Plus the instructor is teaching while you sit there with your mouth open. My buddy was getting a filling and the student kind of used the tooth beside the one needing a filling to pry at something. Of course the good tooth broke. You would think that the student getting reamed out by the instructor would make you feel better, but not is this case. My friend had to get the one tooth filled and a cap on the other. The cap was free, but I would imagine it popped off with the first caramel the next Christmas.


When I think back on my life, I have never regretted spending a lot on good quality, but more often than not, I have regretted being a cheap son-of-a-bitch.

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