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This is a question Waste of money

I once paid a small fortune to a solicitor in a legal case. She got lost on the way to court, turned up late with the wrong papers and started an argument with the judge, who told her to "shut up, for the love of God". A stunning investment.

Thanks to golddust for the suggestion

(, Thu 30 Sep 2010, 12:45)
Pages: Popular, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

This question is now closed.

I tripped up
and dropped my fish in cheese sauce on the floor

it was a waste of mornay
(, Sat 2 Oct 2010, 3:34, Reply)
Bought a radiator off eBay
Trouble is, it was supposed to be a graphics card. It wasn't much use as one.
(, Sat 2 Oct 2010, 1:34, 1 reply)
Duuh...
...fucking getting married to a money-wasting shrew. She gets beaten if she's out of control, but it didn't stop her wanting a car.

So I gave in after six months of lobbying and did it. Fuck me sideways, cars here are expensive. A 1 year old Audi A3, nothing fancy, set me back nearly sixty thousand quid. And what does she do on the second day out? She drove the fucking thing into a wall.

*slap*
(, Sat 2 Oct 2010, 0:50, 14 replies)
oh and another thing
don't ever think a marine aquarium is a good idea, sure they look great in the shop - i spent 3 grand setting one up, pissed 30 or 40 quid a week every time something died. fucked a flatscreen telly spilling salt water down the back of it then eventually realised at 4.5 grand deep shit was not going to stop dying. i got less than 200 quid selling the bits onto the next mug.

you cant replicate a coral reef in your living room and any fucker that tells you otherwise is a liar or an aquarium shop owner (which is the same thing).
(, Sat 2 Oct 2010, 0:43, 16 replies)
early 90's
bought a Mac Quadra 660AV

8mb of ram and a 256mb hard drive! 33mhz woohoo!

plus laser writer (mac)

plus colour inkjet (mac)

i think i spunked over 3.5 grand on that lot IN THE EARLY 90's FFS! i wasn't long out of college had no job but thought this would 'pay for itself in freelance work' in some ways it did - i created a CV on it that set me on my way career wise, that was about all i created on the fucker.

i learned my lesson though, never ever pay for your own hardware, it will be long obsolete while the sting of paying for it still burns deep - i still work in the creative racket but make sure any time i move job i get it written into my contract that aside from my desktop mac i get a bang up to date MacBook Pro provided and most recently an iPhone.

my motto is be good to yourself - just don't pay for it
(, Sat 2 Oct 2010, 0:26, 13 replies)
amazon.co.uk (and shopping online in general)
when you're stuck working overseas, pissed, and making snap purchasing decisions having just been paid - because it's always nice to come home to more toys.

I still haven't watched my Sledgehammer! dvds. I've used the two panga I bought from boker.de maybe once or twice. I've read all the Terminator / Alien / Silent Hill omnibus editions now. There's a plethora of books I haven't read sitting around (Young Stalin, Documents on The Laws Of War, The State Of Africa, etc). Bose headphones (which I promptly lost on a flight). A Sennheiser bluetooth headset (which I never use).

Me & Credit Card & Internet Shopping == Shitcock purchases.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 22:57, 4 replies)
My favorite drummer died at age 32
What a complete waste of Mooney!
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 22:08, Reply)
I bought The Grudge on DVD
With Sarah Michelle-Gellar, (well not with her, like a peculiar form of currency). I then saw the original Japanese version Ju-On and realised what a fat fucking waste of a fiver the Hollywood version was.

Ju-On was the first horror film in years that made me switch every light on before I entered a room, and run across the landing to the bathroom if I went for a pee during the night.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 21:49, 7 replies)
NEC Versa Laptop with Color Active Matrix Monitor and 125 (count them!!) mb hard drive
Got this years ago and spent $3,500 on it. I justified it thinking the color would help my eyes survive and that I really needed it for my studies and it would help me get better grades, etc.

Bought it with a student loan, which means I payed a lot more for it over the next 10 years it took to pay off the loan.

I am truly ashamed at this and blush as I type. I have to not think about all the meals, clothes, bills, dates, car repairs that money could have gone to.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 21:12, Reply)
Today I orderd one of these
www.volkswagen.co.uk/#/new/passat-cc

I've never bought a new car before. I know I may as well go out in the garden and burn 5 grand, but...you know...what the fuck, we'll all be dead soon.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 21:03, 9 replies)
Graphics card with VIVO.
A few years ago, I splurged on a new graphics card. At the time my budget for gfx cards had been about the £70 mark, which had got me various TNTs, Geforce 2s and so forth. This one was a Ti4600 which cost about £150.

I justified this with the extra functionality the VIVO feature would give me. Basically I could sample incoming video - obscure 4-mations stuff from way back that yet hasn't turned up on the net (unless 4od has it - haven't checked how deep their archives are); music videos (anyone remember Headfuck?) and pride and joy, some episodes of Vidz I have on VHS.

One of the things I hadn't thought through is that, unlike MP3 ripping, video has to be done in realtime. Meaning that I'd have to kick the machine off and then wait until the damn thing finished sampling. Of course, I hadn't the patience for that.

Net result, by the time I'd upgraded it to a 6600GT a couple of years later, the only thing I'd sampled was one seventy-minute live set by Orbital.

Still, it was great at playing the vidya at the time.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 18:47, 4 replies)
Motorcycle insurance
A bit of background: I have a motorcycle, it's shit. Good when it works but constantly falls apart/breaks/fucks up and I've spent more repairing it than the - admittedly, cheap - £600 I spent on it in the past 18 months or so.

So when it came to the time of insurance renewal, I decided not to get any more insurance and just sell the fucker. Insurance automatically renewed, lots of kerfuffle resulting in me having to pay the best part of a hundred quid to cancel a policy I didn't want in the first place.

I wrote a letter.


======================================================================

Dear Sir/Madam

Find enclosed a cheque for the amount of £96.75 which is now apparently a debt that I owe to your company, *** insurance. If you recall, my insurance policy for a silver Honda CB600F (1998 model, registration S*** ***) expired on August 19. I had no intention of renewing my policy for several reasons; I could not afford the upkeep of the vehicle and the extensive repairs that had to be made to the radiator. My plan was to keep the motorcycle off-road until I could sell it and thus I did not need to be insured for driving.

However, you saw fit to automatically renew my insurance policy – I understand that this must be terribly convenient for those short-sighted individuals who wish to blindly carry on insuring their vehicle under the same policy without searching for a better deal every twelve months. Unfortunately I am not one of those individuals and even if I had intended to continue making use of my motorcycle and renewing an insurance policy I would be using the wonderful world of price comparison websites in order to find a better deal – if one exists – than offered by *** insurance.

To rub salt in the wound you then decided that in order to cancel my insurance policy – if you cannot remember the last paragraph please note that I did not want the policy renewed in the first place – I would have to pay you £60.00. According to one of your phone staff, a letter and e-mail were sent stating that you would renew my insurance automatically unless I said otherwise. I received no such letter and was informed that the e-mail may have ended up in my (automatically deleted) spam/junk mail folder. I hope that you use my £96.75 in order to hire someone who can better construct your e-mails so they bear less resemblance to advertisements for Viagra, Trojan horse viruses, penis extensions and hot girls from my area.

Your insistence that unless I tell you not to do something, you are allowed to do it, has stunning implications in the legal world for date rape cases especially. Please don’t think I’m being facetious; this is actually an accurate analogy – you are raping my bank account and since my cries of “NO GOD PLEASE STOP OH NO STOP ARGH” cannot be heard by your deaf ears, it is consensual in your eyes. Trust me, I’m very good at metaphors and this one really works.

When I complained about this you offered me the deceptively good deal of being able to reduce my next policy with *** by £60.00 and thus break even on the debacle. I use the phrase “deceptively” because this so-called solution involves me once again taking out an insurance policy with your company which seems like a terrible idea given the utter ineptitude and lack of sympathy you have displayed towards the situation in question. Since then, you have decided to add a payment of £36.75 for no stated reason to bring the total amount owed to £96.75, which you will find in the enclosed cheque.

Please ignore the drawings of penises and repeated curse words written on the cheque – you will find that these do not affect your ability to cash the tender but it will provide me amusement to imagine one of your incompetent and idiotic employees attempting to do so.

Regards,


Matthew Perry


P.S. : I write this extensive letter in the small hope that an *** employee with half a brain will read it and realise that this £96.75 (which represents almost a quarter of my next paycheque) is an unnecessary and borderline criminal charge before removing the charges and returning the phallus-filled cheque.

P.P.S. : I am a journalist and I work for several publications and websites. Should this letter and/or the story of your abusive cheating policy regarding insurance renewal somehow find its way to print or online publication the resulting fallout could potentially cost *** more than £96.75. This may be worth considering.


(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 17:21, 43 replies)
Lack of style and teenage years go hand in hand
I was 17. I was desperately, oh so desperately trying to be a "goth", and thought that a shin-length leather trenchcoat would be teh BUSINESS. Now being a diminutive sort of chap I had fantastic difficulty in finding one to fit, until after weeks of searching I finally found one that would hug my slender frame. I forked over over my hard-earned £250 to the salesman who was grinning from ear to ear like the cheshire cat who'd just got the cream which'd been spiked with E.
After a few unwelcome advances from gentlemen who'd seen me from behind only to look horrified when I turned around it dawned on me.

It was a fucking ladies trenchcoat. >.<
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 17:00, 5 replies)
Videodrome
Back in the dim, distant and of course analogue days of the 1990s, I was into home video (no, not that kind. Well, ok, yes that kind too). I made my own home movies, and I particularly enjoyed the editing part. So, I decided to get a proper edit deck, and in order to get the keep the quality as high as possible, I went for an S-VHS machine.

The machine was great - I used it a lot. But I only ever used it in S-VHS mode once. And that was to test it. I just never got into the habit.

Because S-VHS was the Latest Thing, the damn thing cost me £900. When it finally wore out, I bought the same model on eBay for £30...
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 16:40, 1 reply)
World of Warcraft
Played for about 2 years, my wife(then girlfriend) hated it. After our daughter was born, I quit playing for a while to help out more around the house and whatnot.

It was when I started to play again that I realized I was paying around 15 dollars a month to do the same tasks over and over again with increasing difficulty.

I haven't played it since, and the extra little bit of money pays for netflix, which is far better.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 16:26, 6 replies)
Gym membership.
2 years later and I was a slightly slimmer fat bastard than I was previously.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 16:23, Reply)
my grandfather's grandfather
My grandfather, rest his soul, departed our family's company in early 2004. He was an utter legend of a man, near-mythic in his brilliance. Warm, funny, wonderful, something of a giant of a man, and with always a story to tell. This is one he told us, passed down from his own grandfather, Philip.

Philip had done a lot of travelling in his lifetime. He was never shackled to one place very long, and as such early in his life he'd come to know a great many women. My grandfather told me that he'd confided he'd likely fathered a lot of children in his early life on before heading off on some other adventure, most of whom he didn't know. He later met his wife, who knew nothing of the sort, and that was real love: she came with him from then on as he travelled the world, along with their kids, who the couple loved to bits.

Eventually Philip decided to settle the family down, but before he did he ended up closer to home shores than he had in many years. It was a commune in the north of France, and he spent a couple of years there, befriending the people and generally becoming one of the 'family' in the little, tight-knit community. It was a wonderful experience, all told, and during this time he met a great many interesting faces.

One of these was a local artist who was getting on quite a bit, head almost bald and a great bushy beard sported proudly across his face. He and Philip got on like a house on fire, and Claude often let Philip sit in on his paintings, watching so long as we was quiet. Philip thought he was grand, if a little peculiar, and one of the oddest things about Claude was his little belt problem.

You see, Claude was getting on in years, and he had rather some unfortunate habits when it came to his art. He wouldn't work seriously for months at a time, ballooning to great size: then inspiration would strike and he would become reclusive, barely leaving his home until he was finished his latest masterpiece. During these episodes he would so rarely eat that he practically wasted away. Claude's stomach changed so drastically in size, yo-yoing that he needed a new set of trousers every month or so to accommodate his change in size.

But Claude wouldn't stand for this. One man needed just one pair of trousers, he said, but that little piece of advice for life didn't extend to belts. As such, the artist was constantly purchasing new belts, plucking new holes in them as he got smaller, until the leather fell apart and he needed a new one. Then he'd grow in size, work outward through the pinholes until the very last, and then need a bigger size. This fluctuation was so rapid and happened so often that he ended up destroying his belts through misuse within a matter of months.

Accompanied with this, Claude was also developing a problem with cataracts, and often found himself picking up the wrong belt size, when in a hurry and not trying them on, and ended up wasting all his cash.

This went on the entire time Philip and family were in the commune, and though Philip never said so to Claude, he found the artist's plight wonderfully funny, if a little tragic. After a couple of years, Philip finally ventured home and settled back down in not-so-sunny England, living the rest of his life quietly, telling people of his travels and the stories. Apparently when they left, Claude was shrinking down again, complaining as he always did about needing a new belt between strokes of paint on his newest masterpiece.

And that was the waist of Monet.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 16:23, 5 replies)
Bought a drum kit for my jewish friend once....
Bitch never used it....
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 16:15, 1 reply)
A skeleton walks into a bar...
"Pint of bitter and a mop, please."
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 16:13, Reply)
A man walks into a bar
and notices it's got no roof. It was a topless bar.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 16:02, 2 replies)
I need a Wii.
Got me a shiny tax return a few months ago! 400 quid in the bag, woo! What to buy what to buy...Oh I know. Throw the mind back three years....*wavy lines.* I have a girlfriend, we want a Wii. I trade in my Xbox, Gamecube, PS2, god knows how many games, and she throws in a couple of her games into the pot and we get a shiny brand new launch wii with a bunch of games etc. We have it for a few months, then she tries to kill me. I wish I was joking. So we break up. She claims the Wii is hers because she traded in two of her games for it. No point arguing since she has a baseball bat.

Dragging back to the present, Shiny Tax Return. I'll replace the Wii that the bitch stole! What a fantastic idea. Off to game then. £187 blown, brand spanking new shiny black wii, extra controls, couple games, charger thingy. Fan-fecking-tastic!

I've played it twice. In four months.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 15:52, 10 replies)
Not funny or anything, just fucks me off
Spent £170 on a Buffalo 2TB NAS RAID server for the home.

Fucking thing is useless, nothing it says on the box or instructions works. It's the biggest techno turd I have seen since the Sega Saturn.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 15:48, 18 replies)
60 Quid
on a couple of farm hens and a coup*.

4 eggs in 10 months. £40 vet bill as the bigger one got an infection in it's eye, massive holes in the garden as they loved to dig holes and cram themselves into them while flapping and making a racket.

The only monies worth I got was watching them gobble down the following (in addition to a normal diet of poultry pellets and corn, of course) -

Chips
Pasta
Monster Munch
Rice
Mini Cheddars
Noodles
Stale bread and Cake
various biscuits

which made me giggle as they viciously pecked at a custard cream

In a flat now, hens have gone to a farm, which I doubt provides them with such goodies.

*coop
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 15:33, 11 replies)
Drugs
I have a mate, I shall refer to him simply as "M" to save his blushes. After years of hearing our tales of Massive Drugs, he finally decided to overcome his naturally timid nature, and agreed to join us in a bit of a session.

We settled in at a busy club, sitting around at first, helping him to relax in this unfamiliar environment. After half an hour or so, the pharmaceuticals did their legendary thing, and "M" ventured out onto the dancefloor. Soon he was looning it up with the best of them, and as my mind began to dribble out of my ears, I must admit I lost track of him in the crowd.

A while later, another friend came over, looking freaked out. He told me that "M" had had some kind of bad reaction to the drugs.

I hurried over to where he was laying, and was shocked to discover that "M" was very red and seemed to have become extremely bloated, ballooned up like he was inflated.

Yes, it was the Massive Waist of M on E...

</coat>
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 15:18, 4 replies)
I once stole a joke off the internet and emailed it to some friends.
That was just a paste of funny.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 15:13, 2 replies)
car insurance
i am a 19 year old with testicles, apparently that means that if i am occasionally using it, i will certainly write the thing off 2 and a half times. and dont get me started if i tell them im driving it.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 15:09, 1 reply)
I invested in property
in 2007.

Bye bye life savings.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 14:55, 2 replies)
A horse walks into a bar
and just stands there, staring. The dutiful barman asks if it would like to become part of an amusing anecdote, whereupon the horse excuses itself, explaining that it is, unfortunately, a horse not in possession of a sense of humour, and thus it would be a "waste of m'neigh".

Unfortunately indeed.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 14:48, 3 replies)
e85 kit for the car
Seemed like a great idea at the time..

that was untill e85 became as dear as regular petrol AND a bunch of the petrol stations that used to sell it on my way to work decided to stop doing so..

I now drive a diesel and the unfitted e85 kit is hiding somewhere in the attic..

200e well spent.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 14:47, Reply)
A relatively small amount of money, but totally wasted anyway
My ex-wife liked shoes. Ok, that's not exactly headline news.

She bought a pair in a sale - some designer name apparently - for the bargain price of just £10. The only downside was that they were a kind of rusty orangey colour that didn't go with any piece of clothing that she owned. She actively saught out a blouse or a top of some kind that matched, but she never found one that matched the exact shade.

The shoes were never worn. I occasionally reminded her of this waste of money (only when provoked about my own spending habits of course) and she still maintained that they were a bargain, they were designer, etc etc.

Yes, but you never ever wore them, you silly bint. That, in my scientist's mind, produces a division by zero error.

Conversely, I spent a fortune buying her out of the house and my life, and I don't regret a penny of it.

Swings and roundabouts really.
(, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 14:34, 1 reply)

This question is now closed.

Pages: Popular, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1