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Heavy Plant
Walk past a "Heavy Plant" warning and wonder vaguely if the trees thought it was for them; if whoever put it up had enough imag...
2009-02-28
2009-02-23
Downtime
Normally I spend 3 hours a day traveling to and from work. This is essentially dead time in which I do nothing; I listen to podcasts, I read books. I recognise that these are possibly luxuries that other people would struggle to make time for but the point is I can’t do anything else. Also I exhausted my fairly small library quite quickly, I don’t spend much money on music and whilst the internet has made it easier to find things *cough* quite cheaply *cough* I still haven’t really bothered.
The solution seems pretty obvious i.e. buy a car. However [insert environmental whinging here] and [insert ongoing cost whinging here] so I wasn’t that keen. Until I did the following bit of thinking.
Everyone values their free time but they never put a metric on it. Everyone says they wish they had more time to spend [insert activity or in the company of family here]. So I thought about the spend part of that sentence and actually put a cash value on it. For the sake of argument I valued my time at a reasonably modest $35 an hour. This means I spend $105 of my time each day traveling. Owning a car would give me back 2 of those hours on average saving me $70 of personal time per day. That’s $350 of personal time a week, or extrapolated to 48 working weeks a year, nearly $17,000 of personal time. Getting a car now seems like quite a good idea, an investment even.
Caveat and note to self: This is a gross over-simplification and does not mean that getting a car will make you richer in cash terms unless you can convert those hours into money, which you won’t. Rates are subject to change without notice.
Residual thoughts: What other effects might giving your time a cash value have? How else might I value my time? Given this value what would I do with the extra 2 hours a day?
2009-02-20
Pathological
Strange experience for this week:
Sat in the waiting room of the path lab waiting for a blood test. Lots of people sat around trying to keep the worried look off their faces looking through glossy magazines full of glowingly healthy people.
When I arrived I was the only man in there. This I suppose is down to women's far more intricate and complex plumbing, wiring and maintainence cycles.
Waiting rooms are always peculiar liminal spaces that are neither one thing nor the other and engender a limbo state of mind. Go here, wait. Be tested, wait to find out your results and then find someone to tell what it means.