The Idiot Tax

I’ve discussed The Idiot Tax with lots of people. That’s the price you pay in dollars as reparations for your boneheadedness. For example, rule number one of home repairs is: usually pushing harder is not the solution. I once broke a ceiling fan when I couldn’t get the glass globe off to replace the light bulb. (There was smoke and crackling and everything!) I paid a $22 idiot tax to Home Depot to buy a new ceiling fan and then Tim and I spent about an hour putting it up. Don’t put enough money in the parking meter? You’re paying a $15 idiot tax to the city of Royal Oak. Comprende?

Referencing a previous entry about being a savvy consumer:

During my junior year of college, I bought a Sony Discman. I carefully chose it based on Sony’s reputation for quality electronics, I wanted to be able to run with it and it had a really great skip protection feature, and it came with a car kit that would allow me to play my CD player through my '95 Taurus's tape deck stereo. I got a lot of use out of the car kit and the Discman.

Two years later, I bought a new car that had both a tape deck and a CD player. My car kit lay abandoned for many months (18 maybe?). I finally decided to donate it to Salvation Army last Christmas (12/05) because I figured I would never need it again.

Fast forward to April of this year, one day at the gym, my Discman stopped working. It was too expensive to repair so I thought I would replace it with an MP3 player (after all, it is 2006). After doing my research, I bought a fantastic MP3 player (more on that some other time) and have been very pleased with it.

It’s taken me 4 months to figure out that I can hook the MP3 player up through my car stereo IF I HAD THE CAR KIT THAT I DONATED 9 MONTHS AGO. So I’m going to Salvation Army to see if I can buy one. It’s not often that I get to pay my Idiot Tax to charity.