Lyrics: “Plan Sailing Weather” ~ Frank Turner, 2013
Starting with a rather random1 picture, because I like to have picture going with the automatic tweet, when I share this post on Twitter.
“Rushing through every thing” when my mind is set to do something is a habit / trait I’m not always proud of, but that’s the way I am. At the moment or always have been? I don’t know. I was about to write “I don’t deal well with waiting” which is funny in a weird way, because in many regards I also am very good with waiting (aka procrastinating, avoiding…).
The plan for today was to have a relaxed Saturday. Take care of some chores. Read a bit and all that. But then all of a sudden there was the rush to replace my 2-in-1 tablet (with a detachable keyboard), because around noon I clumsily dropped the one I owned on the living room floor. Of course it missed the carpet and of course it fell with the screen face down. Boom! Cracked and all. The touchscreen didn’t work anymore, but I guess I could have kept using it for a few more days or even weeks, because I don’t really need it right now. Not since I updated my regular desktop computer setup by adding a webcam and such for work. But the impulse was to… replace it. Right away. On a Saturday. Yes, I know how crazy this might sound and trust me there were moments where I was asking myself “where is the rush?!” Which didn’t stop me from rushing. I might want to ponder why tomorrow.
I did a bit of research online, checked the stores sites, because I prefer to buy these kind of gadgets not online but in a real store where I can drop it off for a repair or warranty issues. And I found one that would be a good replacement, so I drove to the store in the big city. The city I had just driven to yesterday to run some errands. And even though I should have remembered the newish speed limits on the main road in, I still was a bit too fast and the speed camera caught me when I came into the city centre. I didn’t need that today, but my own fault for rushing to be somewhere obviously.
I spent about an hour in the store circling various tablets and then came back to the one I had my eyes on, chatted with a staffer, got a good offer for a older model, which still does all I need it to do. Spend a long time in the checkout queue, walked back to the car, which I parked for only the 2nd time using the “pay by phone app” option. For the longest time I thought doing this would be more expensive, because of the additional service charge for using this option. But… as it turned out both times so far, it’s still cheaper than putting too much money in the parking meter. Go figure. Because I so often only have high value coins or don’t know how long it will take and put in more money than needed. In this case today I was also kind of lucky that the long line in front of the mall’s parking garage made me look for on street parking in the first place and that I found a spot. All in all I paid 2.20 € (incl. the fee) instead of 4 € in the garage. It’s the little things. And I need to save money to pay my speeding ticket…
The rest of the afternoon was spend with doing a backup of all the files from the old tablet and then getting the new one going. As it isn’t the newest model it needs some updates. Quite a few updates. It’s still not done installing, but that’s ok. I’ll have a whole day tomorrow to procrastinate other things and deal with getting the tablet set up properly. I’m beyond help…
On a more serious note: I am well aware how privileged I am that I can just go and buy a new gadget, when I need or want to. I didn’t have to wait till I get paid again or think about how that would effect other expenses or financial obligations or such. I’m grateful for that, trust me.
1: The main road into the city, right around where I was caught going a bit over the speed limit, is also where the big event venue is located. Whenever I drove down that road in the past 20 months I often thought about how I found parking in a residential area off that road in walking distance to the venue in February 2020, when I saw Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls (supporting Dropkick Murphys) for the last time before the pandemic. A lifetime ago it seems…
