Buying Things Makes Me Happy

The past couple of weeks have involved far too much impulse buying for my wallet’s liking; rather, my credit card’s liking. It all began with my computer, which, without going into too much detail since I’ve been meaning to blog about it (him / her?), is grand! After tinkering with the BIOS settings, it is now running essentially silently, a welcome change from my old shitbox. That’s right you old P4 2.8GHz, you are now relegated to the title of shitbox.

Recently temperatures on a whole have been rising 3-4ºC after playing games for a couple hours and it doesn’t dissipate as quickly, but I assume that’s just because of the fans all on low. I may have to move the PSU fan to the middle cage to cool the GPU, but that requires opening up the cable wiring side, which I jammed shut and am afraid to open.

Then there’s the mouse fiasco over the past two weeks. It is finally resolved with me being one happy camper. Since we last left off I was left with a slightly pricey Logitech MX Revolution, henceforth known as the MX-R, and a VX Revolution, henceforth known as the VX-R. But now I have in my possession a VX-R and two MX-Rs. From one to three to four mice in total on my desk.

Staples had a promotion last week where a newly purchased MX-R had a $40 MIR associated with it, and newly purchased VX-Rs had a $30 MIR. The sale started Wednesday the 22nd. I had purchased my MX-R a week before and my VX-R just the Friday before so I saw this as a chance to save even more money. I had purchased the MX-R for $59 and VX-R for $38, both after taxes, and I still felt those were ridiculously overpriced for mice even though I saved about $100 and $75 off retail, respectively.

On August 22nd, I went into the store to pricematch the $104.96 price of the MX-R with $62 from Infonec. I was worried they wouldn’t accept the PM because Staples HQ caught on to the fact that people were PMing and then applying the MIR, making them lose a decent amount because of their incompetencies. After talking with the manager on-hand, I was able to get the PM from the original price of $104.96. One of the associates told him that he was supposed to apply the mail-in rebate before PMing, bringing the price down to $66.96 before PMing, saving me only about $0.40. Thankfully, the manager told him, “No, this is how we do it,” going against the internal memo and so I saved $4 instead of $0.40. Isn’t it funny how I know more about Staples’ internal policies than their managers?

So from $104.96, I was able to PM it down to $68.13 after taxes. Applying the MIR, it will be $28.13 after taxes, a far more reasonable price for a top-notch mouse. What will I do with the other one that I have now? Well, I posted it on the Facebook Marketplace and already found a buyer for $65, subsidizing my Staples MX-R down to about $22 after tax. A fair deal for the buyer and a better deal for me; otherwise, I would have just returned the MX-R to Best Buy.

Now the VX-R was a little more convoluted. I bought my VX-R on the 17th and the MIR was only applicable starting the 22nd. I went back to the same store asking to do a return and re-purchase, but they caught on to the scam since this was at the end of the day. They were subtracting the $30 from their retail price so I was only getting $3.1 in savings and they weren’t even applying that savings to the Dell price of $39; instead, they were applying it to the $100 – $30 (MIR) price. I was paying about $10 more than I originally had paid. After many a dumbfounded look being passed back and forth, I asked to just have my original price of $37.50. At this point they had already refunded my original price so they had to ring it through again.

I left the store with a brand new receipt reading August 22nd. I went hope and submitted the MIR.

So, to recap: I bought my original MX-R for $60, selling that for $65. I PMed a second one for $28 after taxes. And my VX-R which has yet to find a home since I really don’t need it, will have cost me $7.50 after taxes! My mom thinks that I invest the most insane amount of energy for such minimal gains. My sister thinks that if I only devoted half the energy I devote to screwing corporations, I’d be a genius and wouldn’t be near failing every term in school. Then again, this is who I am.

And just yesterday, I read that threadless.com was having a $10 t-shirt sale. I didn’t think anything of it when I first saw the sale, but I went on the site yesterday and they’ve got so many cool t-shirts! Too bad so many of the ones I wanted were sold out in all the guy sizes. Shirts like:

And more. Here’s a list of those that I saw when looking for the previous pictures. To save on bandwidth, I’ll just link them:

• FrequenCity: I liked it but I didn’t think it’d look good on me.
• There’s no Crying in Breakfast: Cute, but other than that… yeah.
• In Case of Zombies: Too busy, but hilarious.
• We’re on the Same Level: I almost peed my pants when I saw this one… I don’t know why but I have a certain affinity to giraffes and their tallness.
• Meat is Murder. Tasty, tasty murder.: I just like pissing off vegetarians.
• Procrastinators: Leaders of Tomorrow: Enough said.
• Impossible Love: Awww…
• Nothing Rhymes with Orange: The neglected fruit.
• Rub Me on Your Butt!: I’m starting to sense a pattern here…
• Bad Teddy: Su-Ann got this one…?
• BFF Best Friends Forever: They needed the Pope and his funny hat.
• Pandamonium: Cute but I didn’t like the “heather gray”.
• Flowers in the Attic: Cool shot, but the butterflies aren’t me. I need blood, guts, and splatter.

Yeah, impulse buying = bad. Typically I don’t splurge on clothes since I find that spending x dollars on a regular basis is such a waste since clothes from three years ago aren’t out of style or horribly torn. Plus, it’s university and the ubiquitous hoodie is all I need! But these t-shirts are just too cool. And to close, here are the ones I bought:

I don’t fully understand the last one, and it was on the fence for getting it or not, but what the hell. It’s funny.

Oh, and Veronica, I would’ve bought your Dinosaurs one if it were available. Take that, Noah!