Thursday, June 16, 2005

I'm an hourly

In today's Tulsa World, there was this birth:

Ellen In-The-Woods and Jeremy Jackson, girl.

Any guesses on the origins of that surname?

Speaking of births: it would suck to be a single mother. It would suck even more to be a single mother of twins or triplets, though.


Hourly wages suck. Not for the conventional reasons you may think, though. The reason is that I compare most of my purchases with hours worked. "Wow, Rachel, you just spend 6 hours pay on that and it was that boring day at work." And it doesn't matter how much I make per hour. I could be making $600/hour and I would still be thinking "That electric bill was x minutes of work." When it's REALLY bad for me, though, is when I'm eating something. "You realize that stick of gum you just ate was 30 seconds, right?" When I was in Houston and was salaried, this wasn't an issue. Probably because I spent like 80% of my waking time doing work and never had a chance to buy things. And last year I couldn't really factor in the work hours consistently. One week might be 80 hours, another 60. I doubt I'm the only one that does this, but no one else has ever talked about it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the same way..
Like do I really want half of today to go towards a new Uninteruptable Power Supply for my home PC/server? ¿How boring is that?

If the stick of gum gives you more than 30sec of pleasure, then it was worth it. I'm not sure exactly what the ratio of time-spent/time-enjoyed needs to be to make it a worthwhile purchase though

ET said...

Being a single mother did suck.

I think about things/purchases in terms of wages...or "that costs as much as my house/car/insert-item-here payment" or "do I really want to blow an ENTIRE paycheck on X?" Except for little things...if it's under $10 I don't generally care. Unless I'm broke.

Lavaughn Towell said...

I do that now when I'm on EBay. I think, "That book will cost me two hours at work" or whatever. Good thing I'm working more in the summer!