EGG ON FACE

IE: getting old:

Well I've been bitching that I don't have a working pen on my office desk only to find out in the middle of grabbing different ones i got my Microsoft pen to work,  was fine for the moment i needed. i tested it quickly and did the usual circles on plain paper and it worked in red ink, not what i needed for the official document but good in a pinch for the note i needed for certain data retainment. I wrote what i needed on junk paper and dropped the pen on the desk only to hear it click closed but I didn't care. I picked it back up after finding the official paper i needed to write the data on only to click it open and NOTHING!! yes friends in less than 5 seconds the pen had quit putting out red ink. upon closer inspection i noticed the pen head looked a bit odd and sure enough it was A STYLUS. I was a bit sleepy still and not fully aware thinking i had somehow picked up the wrong pen i closed it again and dropped it on the desk looking for the one that just wrote in red. I didn't find one. I picked up the only Microsoft labeled pen i could find and clicked it hoping it was the red one again, only to find this was a pencil, I had other pencils so this was not a good find when what i needed was a blue or black ink tool. It was at that moment i suspected something was odd as it was the ONLY MS logo pen i had found once again so I closed it and clicked and voila, once again a pencil. i closed it again, click click and once again it was a pencil. I repeated this too many times to tell without seeming more stupid than i am all ready showing.  I finally set it down, picked it up and clicked it again 2 times, SLOWLY, and i got. A PEN HEAD that printed in RED... now, i'm easily confused sometimes but this had bewildered me to the point of aggravation. yet all along i was impervious to the fact that there were four little words printed on the end of the pen at the click button. although round it had four precisely marked words on even spacing as follows: 0.5 / Red / Stylus / Black. In my haste when i picked up the pen over the years I've never noticed this before as my hand was always in the way while holding it.  so yeah, DUH, which ever word is facing up when you click it comes out the other end. I'd seen and owned pens like this before with multiple clickers but never in a single clicker case. In fact in my youth many times i was the cool guy at the sportsman inn pizza restaurant table writing on the back of the place mat (yeah remember those) with a tri color pen or pencil with a tri clicker. So now i feel the geezer this morning (like how i see my father at times lately) here a simple tool with something I've seen before but just not in that simple a configuration (rotate pen and click, how simple) and it got the best of me. Not unlike your parent or grand parent when you showed them a computer or a multifunction remote.
 

VALUE?

VALUE: worth and item costs vs quality and what you get for your money.

 I'm starting to think there is no such idea as something labeled as “good”. Everything is a CRAYON and there's just a whole bunch of crayons out there. A $50 blue is awesome when you need a blue sky, but crappy when you want to draw the sun. It seems that a $2,000 yellow sure makes you say, “Yes! It does look (feel) expensive!” when you are drawing the sun, but then you try to use it to color a Coca-cola logo and you say, “This thing looks like crap.” This seems to apply to everything.

It's always ends up really “expensive” when an items stupid character mates perfectly with a wildly varying source and then people buy into it. It's like if Michael J. Fox with an M-16 happened to sync his shaking up with a moving target and was able to hit it dead on. That doesn't make it a better more accurate gun worth tons of money. Why would you ever want a shaky shooter? Of course the same  is true with a $1 four sided Crayon, sure its able to do more things for a lot less but it breaks easy and doesn't last nearly as long as a standard Crayon no matter what you're drawing. Constant replacement issues are a terrible way to work. You also wouldn't use a Focal SM11 S subwoofer no matter how great it is to be your speaker for a guitar amp and its $8000, its just the wrong item for the job.

 Value and taste is very personal. You may think that the yellow is perfect while I may think is horrible. So what made it worth $2,000? Just because Picasso used it? It's up to you and I to decide what value an item has not just because someone who is deemed (PROFESSIONAL) says its good or got good results with it. (maybe they didn't) This is EXTREMELY true in the music and audio industries. Speakers, Mics, Amps, Mixers, Compressors, Headphones etc. All kinds of hype in there. I've heard amazing things come from a home recording with minimal equipment. I've heard HORRIBLE things come from TOP notch expensive studios using crazy expensive hardware. It's all in how you used it and the situation you are trying to remedy or extract from.

So in reality what is VALUE? It's not really something you can put a finger on and it's not so much a matter of costs directly either. If you are happy with a $5 Crayon then good for you, same could be said for the $2000 one if you really like it. So where's the Value? Could it be something more along the lines of paying for something and getting more than what you expected. Sounds like the definition. But what does that mean, MORE THAN WHAT YOU EXPECTED? Did your car do more after you paid X thousands of dollars? Did it drive on water, did it drive you to your vacation while you were asleep at the wheel, did it walk the dog and do the dishes and take the trash to the curb? If not then maybe you didn't get the value you thought you got. How much better was the $2000 crayon over the $5 one? 5% ? Not really a good value if there isn't much difference but if you THINK that the 5% is worth it then by all means. Perspective makes everyone and everything its bitch.

(thanks to Brandon Drury for some excerpts)