Old Money Habits Die Hard, if at All

I hate to waste money, but for the past six months I’ve been driving my new red Tesla which is the most enjoyable car I’ve ever handled.  I’m able to listen to every radio station in the world, including News Burundi.  I now have a trunk in front and a trunk in back, so my new car serves as an even better portable closet than my last one with hardly any storage space at all.

The two factors which I most love about my Tesla are:

1.    The burst of speed.  I haven’t been pulled over for speeding yet, but I do accelerate from 60 mph to 80 mph rather swiftly.  In fact, if I aim for 80 I usually hit 92 before I notice and throttle back.  Oh, well.
2.    No gas.  I haven’t visited a gas station in the past six months.  I plug my car into its special electrical outlet at home every evening, and in the morning I’m ready to drive another 200 miles.  When I drove to Monterey I did stop twice at a Tesla charging station where the price for the electric charge was right.  It was free.

Of course, there is always a little trouble in paradise.  In this case the difficulty was announced by a flashing light on my Tesla dashboard, proclaiming that the tires had low pressure.

My first line of defense was to ignore the flashing light.  Sure enough, it soon went dark, validating my approach.  I properly assumed that there was an electronic malfunction rather than a tire problem.  During the next several weeks the flashing light and I established an intermittent relationship.  It blinked.  I ignored.  Blinking stopped.  Until today.

This morning, as I backed out of my garage, the blinking light was joined by a rather nasty “beep beep beep,” and the message changed to “very low tire pressure.”

Fortunately I remembered where there was one of those relics – a gas station – on my way to work.  I stopped to fill my tires, and immediately encountered a problem.  There was a $1.00 charge for using the air pump.  As I walked around the rear of my car, intending to drive on to work, I had the following internal debate.

“How dare they charge a dollar for air.  Air should be free.”
“But Alan, they have to stay in business, and they’re selling less gas all the time.”
“But a dollar?  Why not twenty-five cents?”
“What difference does it make?  You’re not buying gas anymore.”
“Maybe there’s a station down the street where the air is free.”
“You don’t have time.  And you’re driving on the freeway later.  This is a safety issue.”
“Suppose the machine takes my four quarters and then doesn’t work?”
“Alan, shut up and just do it.”
“I don’t know if I even have four quarters.”
“DO IT!”

That’s the way this type of inner debate usually ends.  Normally reason trumps emotion, but my emotional habit is to save every dollar I possibly can.  I had a similar debate with myself in a men’s room yesterday.  A penny was lying on the restroom floor.  It was a bright copper penny.  But I had to bend over to pick it up.  In that case emotion won.  I picked it up and dropped it into my pocket, vowing to write an article in a few years about how I turned the penny into a million dollars in my spare time.

Of course, now that penny is gone, together with 99 of its brothers and sisters, disappearing into the machine selling me nothing but air.

I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to my wife.  She’s going to laugh at me.  I spent $1.00 this morning for air.

Alan