Pound Foolish

"It's the lazy man that does the most work." -- Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the Tappet Brothers. We have all tried to carry that one extra grocery bag, rather than making an extra trip and been rewarded with groceries strewn across the floor from a broken or dropped bag. Our laziness has caused more work that it saved. Tom and/or Ray may or may not have been the first to coin that phrase, I don't know. I may or may not have coined a corollary, "It's the cheap man that spends the most." One of the Sons Sneed recently experienced the latter trying to install his own car speakers and may think he coined it. Either way it's true. A guy came into the store today and asked me to get him a plug-in device that would convert 220V electrical current to 110v current, because he is traveling to a country far, far away that requires such a conversion for electrical devices made for use in America. We only stock one such device in our store. It costs about $35, but is a 1600 watt device, meaning that you can use a device that consumes up to 1600 watts with it. You can buy a cheaper converter, but you lose capacity. I can imagine that many people might be pissed to find that their hairdryer or curling iron won't work on vacation because they saved $5 on a swell cheapo adapter. My guy balked at paying $35 for our converter, proclaiming it too costly. It seems to me that in the big scheme of things, $35 is small potatoes in the cost of a trip abroad, but then it's not my $35. So, he left and was heading to a major electronics retailer a couple of miles away, in search of a better deal. He promised to come back, if his quest proved fruitless. Gas and time aren't free and sometimes peace of mind is worth a few bucks. I suspect that he will wind up spending more than he bargains for. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky