What's the most disproportionate amount of time/effort/money you've spent?

[flotemysost]

Yesterday evening I got home around 11pm, went to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water, only to find a meagre dribble came out, tailing off into nothing. Weird. Tried the bathroom taps and the shower, same story. Neither of my flatmates were around but I did my best to wrangle with what I hoped was the stopcock; still sweet diddly squat.

Left a message with the lettings agents' out-of-hours emergency number and paced round irritably for a bit, then impatience got the better of me and I called a 24-hour plumber to come round. By the time they arrived we'd nudged into their post-midnight HELLA SPONDZ price range, but whatever, what's done was done, I was thirsty, and I had no idea how long it might take to sort whatever the problem was.

In my ratty short-sightedness I'd failed to bother Googling whether it might actually be a local mains water issue, which it was, meaning the plumber couldn't do a thing and skipped off to their next job down the road (seeing as the whole street was out). Still didn't know how long it'd take before Thames Water might solve it, so I schlepped out to the nearest 24-hour supermarket and bought some big old bottles of mineral water (normally a practice I find mega wasteful in countries with a clean tap water supply, I know, I know).

I'm not exactly the brawniest person, so by the time I got back to the flat carrying these flagons my shoulders had fallen off and I was more in need than ever of that elusive shower. Poured myself a glass of sweet H2o and thought, ahh I'll give the taps a go just in case, and OBVIOUSLY the problem had been fixed while I was out. I'd essentially spent what could have conceivably covered transport for a weekend getaway on one marginally nicer-tasting glass of water, because I am a fucking idiot. I DON'T EVEN MIND THE TASTE OF HARD WATER, I QUITE LIKE IT ACTUALLY.


What's the most ridiculously disproportionate amount of time/effort/money (actual amount not important, it's the expenditure/reward imbalance) you've spent on something because of failing to actually think logically like a rational member of society?

**disclaimer: I realise the above might sound staggeringly insensitive, I'm fully aware that there are many many people right now with no access to clean water or sanitation, no access to their bank accounts, or indeed no funds anyway. I did keep thinking this as it was happening, I'm not trying to say in any way that this was some kind of harrowing trial or anything like that, it's just an illustration of my own lunacy**

[Sebastian Cobb]

Had a battered old Saab where the power steering lines ruptured. It's a common problem as they run along the front of the car under the bumper and catch spray.

The official bit of bent pipework cost quite a bit of money, but there's a cheap hack where you can saw the old metal lines off near the connectors and attach a hydraulic hose to the stubs and run that in place instead. Way cheaper, especially since I knew a guy in the pub who worked for a company that made hydraulic stuff for fork-lifts and stuff.

I eventually got round to sorting this after leaving the car immobile in the street for about 9 months, mostly because the tax and MOT were running out and it'd have gotten siezed.

Once fixed I took the car in for an MOT, the brakes had seized and needed a rebuild. That cost £1100, but I figured I'd just sorted it so the car would be good for a while, fuck it.

A few weeks later the steering rack lost a tooth. So it had to go to the scrapyard.

[Icehaven]

Our washing machine is broken at the moment so when I need to do a laundry load I have to take a 20 minute bus trip to the launderette on an incredibly unreliable route where it's not uncommon to be waiting for the bus for bloody ages, then the same journey back including the waiting time and walking to/from the stops. On a bad day it can be a 3 hour round trip to use a washing machine for 30 minutes.

Similarly I helped my mum take her recently spayed cat to the vet for a check up last week. I live about 2 hours away via public transport (two trains and a bus), the check-up took about 30 seconds and it turned out it could have been a phone call. 

[shoulders]

Money: Been fined €100 for fare dodging (like a gambler I reckon I'm still up on the deal)

Effort: Spent an entire afternoon breaking my body and mind trying to fit support straps to a broken bed drawer. I was effectively in close combat with it to the death screaming FUCKING.COME.ON.YOU.CUNT and scaring my partner. This is adult life. The happy people you see who tell you to live laugh love have never actually done that, they are either rich and outsource the work or poor and live with a fucked drawer.

Time: Spent several weeks on a major feature for my guide that required a wordpress plugin that then duly broke, fucking everything. It was so irretrievable and the thought of starting from scratch so depressing I had to publish it in its broken form.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

long distance relationship for several years

[touchingcloth]

We were replacing a light fixture when the electrics went out with a massive spark and a bang, and even resetting the fuses didn't bring them back.

We spent weeks trying and failing to get an electrician to come round and ruing what the cost of it was going to be given the only explanation seemed to be that the wires had exploded somewhere inside the walls.

A friend came round one day with her new boyfriend, and after a few drinks we got to asking him more about what he did and it turned out he had a qualification as an electrician. He kindly agreed to don a head torch and go digging through our fuses to work out what was happening, and he was getting increasingly puzzled as he opened up various sockets and boxes to stick his probe in them.

Turns out what had actually happened was our house has a fuse which goes out to another fuse box in the shed, and as well as the outdoor lights and house pump one of fuses leads to a circuit which goes back to the house and powers the dining room light. There was a tripped fuse on that circuit, so we flipped it and resolved the problem instantly.

[shoulders]

long distance relationship for several years

Sorry about moving to Rhyl

[chip]

Picking up just one 20 bag at a time, every few days, for several years.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Went to Kilmarnock to eat at one of the last remaining Wimpy's in Scotland but it was one of the shit ones inside a bowling alley that only had a partial menu and no plates.

[non capisco]

My mate was having his stag weekend at a festival on the Isle of Wight. Agreed with another mate who was a bit hard up at the time that I'd pay for his ticket, he'd pay me back when he could and we'd share the tent he already owned to save me having to buy one. I managed not to notice several red flags that the website I used to buy the tickets was a scam one, later exposed on morning TV by no less of a crusading firebrand than Angela Rippon. Looking back I probably should have not gone with a ticketing website that had a picture of Freddie Mercury looking triumphant on stage on its 'festivals' homepage in the year of our lord 2007. Anywhere getting him would have been quite the coup.

When this became undeniably obvious a week before the stag (a man answering the number on the website telling me to go away) I had no other choice but to buy two more tickets from a more reputable site. I realised when I got the e-receipt that these were going to my old address. Not a worry, I'm in contact with the guy who lives there, we're still good. Phoned him up and told him what had happened and could I go and collect? He says save yourself the effort, I'll send them to you. I assumed this involved misusing a work courier facility for a freebie and I think he'd said as such. No, it involved sticking them in the post and shortly after "not being sure" whether they'd put a stamp on the envelope. Needless to say, two days before the festival they hadn't turned up and shock horror never did.

I'd obviously written this whole thing off now, four tickets purchased and none of them tangible. Wasn't meant to be, was it? Then I learned at work with a day to go that's someone's mates had two spares and if I left early and met them at London Victoria they were mine. Here we go then, third time's the charm. Tickets secured, we're going to your stag, Darren. Only my mate who I bought the ticket for couldn't make it down for the opening day all of a sudden. Some work thing that he'd agreed to last minute presumably because his dunce mate had proved himself completely incapable of simply purchasing items, TWICE. What I should have done was probably buy a tent in that case but I thought "Nah, I'll busk it. Probably just stay up all night instead." Torrential rain from the first second I stepped over the festival threshold which lasted all through the weekend without mercy or cease. Everyone else already two men to a tent, no room at the inn for old capisco. There was technically a spare tent but it was more of a wendy house type getup that one of our number had brought just to stash stuff in. It was a tent in the same sense a box with wheels drawn on and 'MY CAR' written on it is a car. Discovered it leaked quite dramatically as soon as I lay down. Not even the lingering after effects of a mediocre pinger bought on site from a man who chose to call himself 'Excalibur' can make that situation halfway enjoyable. "A lot of money and effort for this." I said out loud into the pissing howling maelstrom.

Just realised that at no point in any of that do I expend much "effort" at all and it's at best adjacent to an anecdote but I've typed it all out now so fuck it.

[madhair60]

i for one am glad you posted it

[Icehaven]

Me too. 4 hour round trip to confirm a cat's bollocks are alright doesn't seem so bad now.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Drove from Manchester to Newport to meet an estate agent to look at a house to rent

His keys didn't work in the door, he said sorry about that

We said, you got any more house to show us cunt? Preferably one we can look inside of

He said no just this one

So we drove home

[Brian Freeze]

Me n heavily pregnant Mrs booked a hotel in Bradford so we could go and watch This is Cinerama and have a curry after.

Got the National Express all the way over the hill from sunny Lancashire and wandered up to the BFI only to find out they weren't showing the film for some reason. So we mooched about Bradford until hotel check in time only to find we had been double booked and the hotel owner was out on the lash after buying the Bulls that day and was very uninterested in our situation. We were offered a room in a shithole so wandered back to the bus station and sweettalked a driver to let us on with the tickets for the next day. Ended up with a curry from 200yds away. Still not seen the film.

[Dex Sawash]

GONNA NEED BUZBY TO EXPLAIN TELEPHONIC FELINE TESTICLE VERIFICATION

[The F Bomb]

1990 Lotus Elan

[shoulders]

2002 Carrera Mountain Bike

[Brian Freeze]

GONNA NEED BUZBY TO EXPLAIN TELEPHONIC FELINE TESTICLE VERIFICATION

I will do this for him.

Spayed = lady cat hysterectomy operation = no bollocks required.

Telephone consultation =

"Is cat ok?"

"Yeah? Cool, see you later, give us a ring if you have any concerns"

"sixty quid please, thanks "

[Brian Freeze]

This is a recent one.

Go walk with dog early Sunday mornings in a local area of outstanding natural beauty and try to do my bit with litter picking and that.

One day we were out and I found two stiles in close proximity that with the timely addition of a couple of bits of wood would last for years to come rather than require a full rebuild.

I can do that, thinks me. Quite fancied being the guerrilla stile fettler. You won't know when or where he will strike but he'll do a reasonably good job under cover of darkness.

It's quite a trek to where the stiles are so we went back the following week with tape measure to take down the particulars and then set about scrounging some wood. Found some in a skip and tapped up some builders near work who were packing up.

Spent a day off cutting and shaping the wood and a couple of weeks soaking in preservative and treating it. Bought a new saw, nails and wood preserver to do all this.

The first stile was a piece of piss and that got done on one Sunday but the other needed 2 x 4ft lengths of wood plus lump hammer, claw hammer, drill and bits and pieces. My back was bad and my knees were buggered but set about carrying everything carefully for an hour up into the hills at 6am one Sunday morning. It was a bit of a struggle but I paced myself and took it steadily as a test of endurance. Made it to the first stile with minimal rests. I'm feeling pretty good now, almost happy with achievement.

We crossed the bridge to the other stile, switched the head torch on.

SOME FUCKING CUNT HAS ALREADY FIXED THE FUCKING STILE!

I laughed, cried, then laughed again. Then cried again and looked how far back it was to the car with all this shit I'd carried up there.

Fuck it, I took off their shitty scraps of timber and fixed mine in place and came home.

[Gurke and Hare]

I hope that at the same time whoever fixed that one was similarly cursing you at the first one.

[Brian Freeze]

I hadn't thought of that.

Cheered me up no end, thanks!

[Minami Minegishi]

I did a two year masters degree and because I am OCD I couldn't handle the MS Word automatic footnote system because of the way it formats them.

So I inputted all my footnotes, changing the numbers to superscript etc. If I added a footnote I would have to change all the footnote numbers.

Hours and hours wasted. Madness.

[salr]

Google (Amazon?) Mechanical Turk.

About 15 years ago I spent a while doing this, looking at pictures taken for Google Street View and inputting the actual house name in the picture. It was when streetview was still relatively new and it was sort of interesting seeing random streetviews from the US of A. Earned something like $15-25 dollars doing it, maybe spent IDK 8 or 10 hours plowing through pictures, then found out you could only claim the money if you were a us citizen.

[Icehaven]

GONNA NEED BUZBY TO EXPLAIN TELEPHONIC FELINE TESTICLE VERIFICATION

We could have emailed a photo to accompany the phonecall, and indeed did so yesterday to avoid yet another vet trip. Yes I did spend Sunday morning taking photos of a cat's balls, what of it?

[PlanktonSideburns]

You gonna tease us like this all night or chuck them up on imgur

[DrGreggles]

Peloton

[flotemysost]

Excellent stuff in here.

I did a two year masters degree and because I am OCD I couldn't handle the MS Word automatic footnote system because of the way it formats them.

So I inputted all my footnotes, changing the numbers to superscript etc. If I added a footnote I would have to change all the footnote numbers.

Hours and hours wasted. Madness.

Oh yeah, done countless instances of this kinda thing with Excel, except in my case rather than being a deliberate choice it's because I'm pretty much illiterate when it comes to numbers and I can't get my head around the most elementary of formulae, to the point where it's too embarrassing to ask for help so I often resort to spending ages doing things laboriously (and probably still wrong) like a loon instead.

Fuck it, I took off their shitty scraps of timber and fixed mine in place and came home.

I suppose you could say you really... STILE-d that one out!!!

(nah that sounds very frustrating; anything that involves carrying lots of heavy shit around and finally arriving at your destination, sweating buckets and with fresh stigmata blooming on your extremities, only to find out it's no longer needed/you have to go even further etc. always feels really galling. Given my cossetted metropolitan existence this has only really come up for me with stuff like moving house/building furniture/going to music festivals, as per some of the other examples offered here, but STILL)

[Terry Torpid]

Gillette razors, first the Mach 3 (with a then-whopping three blades) and later the Fusion 5 Power (the battery-powered vibrating one with a ridiculous five blades at the front and another one round the back).

The blades always clog up with shaving soap every few strokes, like pasta sauce in a sieve, and I'd spend more time rinsing than shaving. They don't last long before they need to be replaced. The used heads can't be recycled. There's a lot of plastic getting binned every couple of weeks, not least the packaging. The refills are expensive. The heads are all proprietary, and only fit particular handles. There's no way to swap bits around. They don't even give a good shave. I got razor burn regularly.

I binned the lot and switched to an old fashioned double edged safety razor. The blades cost pennies. You can get a hundred in a pack. I haven't bought any since before covid. I've got enough to last years. They all have the same standard dimensions regardless of manufacturer. You can use a Wilkinson Sword blade in a Gillette razor, and the other way round. They still have to be dumped, it's only a single little sliver of steel, instead of the big plastic heads with cooling strips and pivots and all that rubbish. A good razor will last for decades. Once you've bought it, you never need to give them money again. I'm never going back to cartridges.

[seepage]

Superdrug used to do own-brand cheaper cartridges that fitted the Mach 3 handle but they were MASSIVE for no apparent reason, and the distance from the top to the blade meant you couldn't shave under your nose

[El Unicornio, mang]

https://news.sky.com/story/man-builds-eiffel-tower-model-with-700-000-matchsticks-over-eight-years-only-to-have-world-record-rejected-13065876