Words For <i>Your</i> Enjoyment: House Cleansing For The Very Rich (Or Lazy)

This week, Dylan was kind enough to fill the WFME mailboxes with a cornicopia of ideas for “Words For Your Enjoyment”. This particular one got the powers-that-be behind the scenes of W.F.Y.E. thinking:

“Have you ever had an experience where you disposed of an expensive contraption because fixing/cleaning/making it useful again was too much trouble?”

My head got to spinning bigtime this week, thinking about all the instances in which I acted extremely wasteful. Instances where I threw out perfectly good items simply because getting them into shape required some kind of action I was not interested in doing.

The Fridge: During my third year of college I had decided to cook for my roommates so I went out and purchased all the necessary ingredients to make a cheesecake. Yet, we were young men sharing an apartment in college and had no mixer to mix the block of cream cheese with the other ingredients. Instead, I used a fork. When the cheesecake was done, it was lumpy, and none of my rommates wanted to try it because why in god’s name would I be giving away free food — there was obviously something wrong with it. I tasted it, and shoved it into the back of the fridge. That was January. In June, when we moved out — something had grown and discolored the whole back corner of the fridge. Needless to say, instead of cleaning it and taking it with ourselves to the new summer locale, we threw the damn thing away.

The above scenario also goes for nice dishes or bowls that, at one time, housed some kind of Chinese Food leftovers. In fact, tupperware also can be lumped into this scenario. I have thrown away more dishes and tupperware containers that contained something that could not be identified at the time of opening (or pulling back of saran wrap) than can even be counted.

Sony 5 CD Changer: Aaah, the five disc changer with the remote control that didn’t work, causing lazy folk to have to get up and manually change the format, programming options, etcetera. Although I probably should have just ordered a new remote or sold the thing on eBay, I just placed it gingerly on my front step — it was gone in about 10 minutes.

I think, personally, Dylan’s question affects two groups of people. There’s the people like me who are not “handy guys” and those who are so handy they could probably “build barns for the Amish” if they wanted. I wish I was more handy or more interested in fixing things that were broken — but in the end it’s just easier to throw the damn things out and get a shiny new one. It’s funny because today when I received Dylan’s suggestion I had just cursed out my dog for knocking my Powerbook onto the floor, bending the power adapter plug and causing the outer edge of my Powerbook casing to become a little bent.

I immediately wondered about how I could get rid of this Powerbook and get a new one.

I guess in the end, you can divide people into two groups. People who are frugal and like to salvage/fix things for the satisfaction/monetary savings — and people like me who love things to be perfect and when they’re not we figure it’s just easier picking up a new, perfect version. Is that so wrong?

Which version are YOU?