Bad buying decision

My artis­tic daugh­ter (also my only daugh­ter, as it turns out) wanted a cam­era — so she could cap­ture images through her eyes.

Since I love tak­ing pho­tos of weird things, and since she thinks a lot like me in those ways, I was quite happy to get a cam­era for her birth­day. Know­ing she is not a dis­crim­i­nat­ing con­sumer, I bought the inex­pen­sive HP you see here from buy.com. It never worked right. You can see the lit­tle bat­tery leak at the lower left cor­ner. Some­how it drained the bat­ter­ies so fast that she could only take about three pho­tos before the bat­ter­ies died. And by the time I fig­ured it out, the war­ranty had expired. (And sadly, I could not even sell it with a clean con­science for a give­away price on craigslist.)

Moral of the story? Some­times it’s worth it to spend more to get a bet­ter what­ever. The ini­tial cost may be more, but it will cost you less in the long run.