Is it worth it?

The odd thing about moving is that it requires a tremendous amount of work (packing, moving, unpacking) that often can't be justified. We're not talking a move necessitated by a job change. We moved 10 minutes from my old house just because we (read my wife) liked the new house, neighbors, and school system better. Of course, there's dog shit on this lawn too (which is why the grass always looks greener from a distance).



To salvage some purpose from this senseless move, I started thinking about how people make decisions and realized we're all insane. We don't do formal cost/benefit analyses, we just go with our gut. Today was a case in point.



I really wanted to get my basement office in order after the move, so I wanted to get my bookshelves set up and boxes unpacked. I've been staring at a the moldy carpet for a week hoping the mold would move out, but it hasn't. I decided I couldn't live with the mold on the carpet. Of course, I could survive the non-toxic mold, I just couldn't live with it. Thankfully, my wife took pity on me and called the carpet monger to de-moldify my cave (ironically enough carpet bombs have nothing to do with carpets).



So I spent a few hours moving all the stuff into the uncarpeted area of the basement only to wish I'd cleaned the carpets before I moved the stuff downstairs. Bob Brown of Brown's Carpet Cleaning arrived at the appointed time (disqualifying him for a career with the phone company). The mold was but a momentary inconvenience to his light saber (okay, it was a 220-degree steam cleaner). But I forgot about the paint.



Here is where I wish I'd lost consciousness instead of merely losing any rational sense of worth-it-ness. I'd forgotten that one of my file cabinets was hiding a 2-foot diameter paint stain. A previous troglodyte had spilled about a gallon of latex paint and merely let it dry on the carpet. He must have been on deadline. I was prepared to ignore the paint spot, but Bob was a man on a mission. At his urging, I poured an entire gallon of paint thinner on the carpet and scrubbed it with a brush repeatedly over the course of an hour. For an extra $20 bucks and 60 minutes of elbow grease, we got the old paint out of the carpet. Was it worth it? Hell no, not by any rational standard. But now I can walk downstairs and be proud of my clean rug and I don't have to position the furniture strategically to hide it.



It seems to me that we all make irrational decisions like this every day. We do what feels right at the moment for reasons that don't make a lot of sense to others. I can't blame it on the paint thinner. Maybe Bob pulled the Jedi mind trick on me, but what would a Jedi need with an extra $20?



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What is the most irrational thing you've ever done from a cost/benefit perspective?