"False economies"

14 September, 2000

I come from a long line of cheapskates. From infancy I have been taught to look for bargains, never to throw things away that are still good, not to buy new things if the old one is still working. Many times I have been grateful for these habits. Sometimes I'm not.

Let me begin at the beginning. I walk a lot. I ride the bus in to work and I walk home. Even before I came to Seattle, I walked everywhere. So years ago I bought my first Walkman. It wasn't an actual Sony Walkman, of course, it was a cheaper model from some no-name company. But it was a small, portable device that I used to listen to music or news while I walked. Eventually I wore that one out and had to buy a new one.

I've been through several of these personal stereos. A couple years ago the personal stereo I had been using died rather suddenly. It happened to occur during a month when I had a lot of extra, unusual expenses, so I felt pinched for cash. It just happened that one of the neighborhood stores was discontinuing several brands of electronics and they had some personal stereos for sale dirt cheap. So I bought one of these ultra-frugal models. It worked all right, at first.

Sort of. For a number of years I had been using rechargable batteries for a lot of battery-operated things around the house. But I noticed almost immediately that the new stereo seemed to completely drain the rechargables in a single trip to work. I thought at first that maybe the batteries were just getting too old to take a full charge, but they seemed to work fine in other devices.

It wasn't long until I was out of the habit of using the rechargables and was back to buying batteries regularly.

Then, the tape playing portion of the stereo began having this annoying hum. But the hum was only audible if I was walking directly under electrical cables and it was clipped to my belt upright. At first. As the months went by, the annoying hum began to happen no matter where I was or how I carried it. The tape motor developed a spontanaeity function - it would turn itself on while I was listening to the radio. It didn't feed the tape signal into the earphones, the motor just ran... and ran... and ran. And the auto-stop feature stopped working. So if I wasn't paying really close attention and noticed the slight vibration, I could burn up batteries at double the normal speed.

A few weeks ago the annoying hum started coming into the radio every now and then. And the tape motor stopped playing at the right speed. I had already made a mental note to start shopping for a new personal stereo when the machine decided to take annoyance to a new level.

I was walking home, listening to the radio and being annoyed that I couldn't listen to one of my tapes. Suddenly, the most horrible loud buzz came into the earphone. I turned off the stereo immediately.

The buzz didn't stop. I unclipped it from my belt and checked the buttons. Everything was turned off. But the buzz continued. I shook it. The $#%&@! tape motor started running, at fast-forward speed. And the buzz got louder. I pulled off the head phones and yanked the tape out of the stereo. I was sorely tempted to throw the thing as hard as I could... but I stopped, took a deep breath, and pulled out the batteries. It finally stopped.

I shoved everything into my backpack and finished the walk home. That weekend I went shopping, and for a few minutes I was looking at the really cheap, no-name brands again. Then I noticed that there was an actual Sony® Walkman™ that was only about ten dollars more than the cheap ones I was looking at. Then I noticed that some of the Sonys had these locks that could prevent the players from being turned on accidently just by bumping the player.

One thing led to another and I bought the model that receives AM, FM, and TV audio, has lots of other bells and whistles, but most importanly had a little idicator on the front that tells me how much charge was left in the batteries. I bought some new rechargables and took everything home.

I tested all the old rechargable batteries--the ones that have been laying around unused for most of the last year and a half. All of them registered on the little indicator as half-charged after they sat in the charger for the weekend. I decided to put a couple of the old ones in and see how long they lasted.

It's been eight work days, now, and the stereo is still running on the same pair of batteries. I suspect I could run it for a whole month on regular batteries that would barely last a week in the old player.

And the sound is so much better than the cheap one was. I figured in the last year I've spent more on batteries for the cheap stereo than it cost to buy this fancy Walkman. So if I can keep using the old rechargables, instead of having to buy new batteries all the time, this thing will pay for itself in less than a year. Not to mention how much nicer it is to listen to and use.

I guess that's why they have the old saying about being penny wise and pound foolish.

There are several lessons one could draw from all of this. But for now, I'm not going to worry about any of that. The weather outside is gorgeous, and I have a tape that I know will be real fun to walk home to.

Ciao!

This page is copyright 2000 by Gene Breshears. Photograph is copyright 1998 by Julie Rampke. All Rights Reserved.