Had to put the car in for a service yesterday and was anticipating a very spendy bill. Which is what I got, plus a 24hr delay because of all the work I was paying for.
There was almost never a convenient time to do this sort of thing of course and this week was no different with Jane arriving back from Melbourne and a lot of Christmas shopping and groceries needing to be bought. And suddenly we have no car. That was fine. We cabbed over to West End. Had dinner in a nice Thai restaurant. Bought some groceries and caught an Uber home.
Not having to drive, I could have an extra drink which was nice but it did put me in mind of the Terry Pratchett ‘boots theory’ of how expensive it is to be poor.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money," Pratchett wrote. "Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars."
Those two rides cost nearly $70. A price I don’t normally have to think about because we can afford to run a car and get it serviced and so on.
It really does cost a lot to be poor.