Since buying my Eee last week, Ive been thinking back to other gadgety goodness I’ve indulged in over the years. And it got me thinking about money, and how my attitudes towards it have changed.

The reason I got from gadgets to money is that you generally need the latter to acquire the former (unless you steal them, i guess). I was thinking back to about 5 years ago, when I really wanted a PDA* (for pretty much no practical reason, I may add). These things can cost anywhere from £75 to £300, depending on how much you’ve got to throw away. And at the time the one I wanted was about £90 (it was a Handspring Visor, by the way, and as an aside How did Palm and Handspring throw away the PDA market? At the time their products were demonstrably better than any Windows-based effort, but now Handspring doesn’t exist and Palm is just making a complete hash of things. I digress…). I remember that, at the time, £90 seemed like a huge amount of money to throw away on a gadget, mainly because I didn’t have it. I did get some money together eventually, and got the PDA (which I played with for a few months before burying it at the bottom of a drawer…), but it still felt like a huge amount of money.

Somewhere along the way, my idea of “a vast amount of money” has changed somewhat. Obviously, I have access to more money now thanks to things like loans and overdrafts and a job, but even so, when I bought the Eee last week I spent over £200 almost on a whim, because the display model was ever so shiny…

I really notice the whole perception-change thing at work. I work in a bank, and the way you look at money there is somewhat skewed. When someone wants to withdraw, say, £100, I think “pah, only a hundred? Take out a thousand, you wimp”. Never mind that its just over twice what I earn in a day… You can sit with £1500 sat in your till and think to yourself “good, thats not much, I’m fine”. At the end of the day there can be tens of thousands of pounds on the floor waiting to be counted, and you don’t really think of it as “a lot of money”. Actually I kind of disconnect completely with the concept of money when I’m at work; I don’t think “that’s £5,000 there it can buy me a nice car and insurance and a year’s running costs”, I just think of it as, well, just a number, really. It’s slightly odd, now I come to think of it, although probably good to stop temptation…

Once again I’m not sure where I’m going with this, so I’ll leave it here. After people saying the last entry was “damn good” and “interesting and worthwhile”, it feels as if theres some sort of pressure to keep writing to a high standard… I don’t generally think what I write is that good; I write loads of things only to get halfway through and think “what the hell are you on about? This is crap”. I must’ve written the last entry at least a couple of times in the past and never posted it… Ho hum.

* If it wasnt clear before, that really marks me out as a geek…

Posted In: Uncategorized Tagged: