MASSIVE freeview setup
so that I could watch the channels from my planet of origin..

about 700e for the gear another 300e on setup.. only to find that..

it doesn't work.. cause it's shit..

well it works but I cant watch the channels I want to cause they're not freeview when they're obtained through sat..only over cable apparently.

So yeah now I have a massive dish sitting on the side of the house that I'll never use. right next to it is the sky dish.. which then in turn costs me about a gazzillion squids on a monthly basis and shows me nothing but repeats, ads and repeats of ads..

There's another waste of money..

Sky.. in any way shape or form.. what a pack of wank...

mind you when I didn't have it .. I did miss it..

when I got it it was great for 2 weeks..then I seemed to have watched the lot..

Apologies for rantyness.. but dear god TELLY IS SHIT!
(wankymcwankwank Eels, tobacconists, hovercraft and bouncy bouncy., Fri 1 Oct 2010, 14:31, 5 replies)

I bought a book of puns.
It was rubbish.

A complete waste of money.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 14:21, 5 replies)

Windows bloody media centre
2 years ago, I spunked a grand on a purpose built Windows Media Centre. It was supposed to change my life with its inbuilt multi-tuner freeview and freesat card, huge hard drive, combined blu-ray and HD DVD drive etc. I was going to be able to do away with Sky plus, keep all my music, films and pictures in one place, watch HD stuff etc.

The reality has been that it crashes on an almost daily basis, the TV tuner, power supply and video card all exploded, it loses its channels every few days (requiring a retune) and is no where near as silent as it was supposed to be. I have probably spent another few hundred on it, replacing the bits that sploded.

Overall, it was a complete waste of cash, something that my missus never tires of reminding me.
(Tom Jones's Mojo Hasn't had any since, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 14:11, 3 replies)

Tiny PCs
hey.... the EsCom PC story made me realise I pissed a fortune away on a "special deal" with a Tiny PC.... who then got bought out by TIME (remember Leonard Nimoy's shitty adverts about "time machines"??)

that PC was fucking useless, and was supposed to be top of the range at the time yet lagged like hell running fucking Civilisation 3 (how do you manage to LAG on a standalone machine??)

anyway... the girl who sold it to me had cracking norks! probably why I went in there in the first place....
(Anne Frank started to build a loft conversion on, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 14:00, 8 replies)

My friend's belt snapped the other day
when we were out walking. The only way he could keep his trousers up was by tying many sun flowers together, head to stalk, and using the sunflower rope as a kind of rudimentary replacement belt.

As he wondered home, the sunflowers glistening in the evening sun, I realised it looked like he had a waist of Monet.

Sorry *



* not even slightly
(MrOli is ugly, but in the morning you will be sober, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 13:55, 7 replies)

Back in 1995
EsCom P60 with 1st generation Windows 95. Buggy as you like and complete with floating point error. Escom went bust 3 days after I bought it.
(davywavy, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 13:49, 6 replies)

Just for the record
I love my bread-maker and use it all the time. Saves a fortune, as it costs approx. 10p to bake a loaf that would cost £1 in the shops. Nicer, too.
(IHateSprouts is baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 13:49, 5 replies)

I bought a mobile phone online, with £20 credit
A week and four phone calls to Orange customer services later they still hadn't applied the credit to the phone, so it was unusable. So I bought £10 credit in a shop and the receipt showed "Top Up Successful" but there was still no credit on the phone.

In the end, I sent the phone back "for a full refund." They refunded the phone, but not any of the £30 I'd spent on credit, even when I produced bank statements and receipts proving my purchase. After numerous complaints they told me I'd have to approach a different department. I'm still waiting for the money, over 6 months later.

I'll never buy a phone online again, 'specially not from Orange.
(IHateSprouts is baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 13:47, 2 replies)

In a cupboard in the kitchen chez moi ....
nestles a Soda Stream, an ice cream maker, a bread maker and about £200 worth of food processor and accessories.
( Ramsay Tupper, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 13:45, 6 replies)

Hair Cuts
Since becoming a student I decided paying someone to cut my fringe for me is a waste of money and have taken to cutting my own hair to save pennies for
more important things such as beverages of the alcoholic variety.
Give it 5 years and I'm sure I'll be posting about how much of a dick I more than likely currently look.
(FootOfTim, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 13:27, Reply)

Right.
I'm from up North, right, and, erm ... I fancy myself as something of a 1970s gangster from the Blaxploitation movies, erm ... and was visiting my girlfried on a road called Way Street.

Which, er ... which is a Way St of m'oney ...

Erm ...

*whine*
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 13:00, 3 replies)

Nee Nar
I've bought loads of old tut on the internet. I'll try and give you a top ten.

10. Palm V about 10 years ago. Never used it, not once.
9. A scope. Crossed between a telescope and a pair of binoculars.
8. Metal detector.
7. Western digital mirror drive. Tried to use it but it's now corrupt.
6. One of those 10 in 1 jump starter packs with a built in air compressor.
5. Original pair of Bauer Turbo 33 skates (I'm 35, hetro and male)
4. An original Bullseye tankard. The ones that Jim Bowen gave out in the 80s.
3. 2, yes 2 Honda CUB 90s.
2. An actual crystal ball off Bid-Up-TV.
1. Tuesday I bought an original 1980s fire engine/ambulance/police siren off eBay.

I think the siren has a huge potential in shitting people up though.

Oh yes then there was the bread maker, the Jack LaLanne juicer, the obsolete bank notes for nostalgic purposes...
(Croque Monsieur, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 12:55, 7 replies)

Universal Touch screen Remote control.
This thing is fantastic, really. You can program it to do anything and upload lovely pictures to the touch-screen and set up macros to do all sorts of wonderful things.

Realised it'd take hours to set up and it's been sitting underneath the telly glowing seductively for the past 18 months.

In the meantime I use the decaying all-in-one I've had for about 8 years that all the buttons and backlighting have worn off of.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 12:50, 2 replies)

I went to Ikea last night...
Last night I went to Ikea Wembley for a nice glass shelving unit - a bargain at £40. I am now £120 lighter.

I bought a lantern. I don't need a lantern. Yet a lantern I now own.

I bought a one-cup cafetiere and 100 tea light candles (£1.38!). Twenty-four hours ago, had you asked me if I need a cafetiere and a block of low-grade candles I'd have said no. Now I can't possibly live without them.

I bought a rug, some heavy duty salad tongs and some loganberry-scented candles. I bought a set of coloured knives.

I bought a table for £5. A TABLE! It's currently stored flat-pack because I don't want it and I don't have room for it. BUT IT WAS ONLY FIVE POUNDS!

What the actual fuck happens to the part of the brain which handles reasoning when you walk into that place?
(Miraclefish How appropriate, you fight like a cow, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 12:41, 6 replies)

I bought the rights to "First"
and all I got was shitty 105th.
( monkeyboyalpha jumping on the bandwagon since, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 12:05, Reply)

Unsuitable motor
My weakness is definitely cars. I've been driving 14 years but have had around 26 cars in that time! Everytime I tell myself I'm gonna buy a nice one suitable for my circumstances, which then promptly change.

Take for example 5 years ago when I was commuting into outer London from Milton Keynes. Every day I'd spend 1 1/2 - 2 hours in stop start traffic. My average speed for the journey was about 8mph! Clearly the aging tuned up VW corrado I drove wasn't up to it anymore and the engine went bang when it overheated in stationary traffic.
So I decided it was time for a "sensible" car. I took my savings and spent £5k on a 20v petrol VW passat, crucially with an automatic gearbox. Sure the salesman tried to talk me into a Diesel one but I was having none of it. Now the stop start traffic would be of no concern but I'd have a bit of power for the occasional quick bit!

Barely 3 months later and I'm relocating to Devon. Sure I've still got a 35 mile motorway commute to work but the traffic is non existent! Seriously my average speed now is 70mph (honest officer). The brilliant choice of automatic and petrol means I'm getting just over 20mpg but earning less too. So the car's gotta go as I can't afford to run it. This is where I learn about regional demand, in that in Devon nobody wants a petrol automatic car, everybody here drives diesels. I eventually got £2200 for it.

Repeat this same sequence a few more times with a Vauxhall Meriva (awful car) when we had a baby, a campervan just before we split up etc etc.

Yeah I love cars, but I make terrible choices about which ones to buy. Currently saving for an Audi A4 convertible!
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 11:46, 5 replies)

The 'Smoothie Maker'
I saw an advert for one of these. I declined to buy one, on the grounds that I already owned a "Blender."
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 11:36, 1 reply)

for a millionaire, it's only a drop in an ocean!
Jimi Heselden's new Segway???
(Anne Frank started to build a loft conversion on, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 11:20, 1 reply)

Transatlantic flights and car hire
Why do I get caught out, every sodding time.

After hours and hours in a plane, crossing the Atlantic, followed by the interminable wait at immigration, the last thing the intrepid traveller is equipped to deal with is the wily staff at a car rental desk. Everybody knows, nowadays, that they should get their insurance upgraded before they fly, so as to avoid the ridiculously expensive insurance that's available on arrival, or to avoid paying for the full tank of petrol that's charged at twice the price of the petrol station outside the airport. Knowing this, the rental companies now try other ways to extract extra cash, all of which are for things that are usually an utter waste of money.

A few of my favourites are as follows;
- Upgrade to a better car - We've not got the class of car you reserved, so we'll have to give you a better car for free, unless we give you a great deal on an upgrade and get some extra cash for nothing.
- Peace of mind with a sat-nav, only a few dollars a day - when added up, for a two week holiday, you could buy two sat-navs at Wal Mart and still have money left over for a trip to Wendy's
- Half-price rental on a convertible - in January
And, my all time favourite,
- Prepay all your tolls, save time and money, only $20 - In two weeks, we drove through four toll gates, two coming from the airport, two going to the airport, only one each way accepted the pre-paid tolls. Grand saving of -$22
(lardyboy Next stop, Fissplap Central, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 10:59, Reply)

Rockband ps3s and Drums
I'm fiercly talented in wasting money..

I must have spent a couple of hundred e on downloadable tracks for rockband on the ps3

I own 3x ps3 machines..only ever use the one, and at that what I use it for is streaming downloaded media *cough* over the network.

also when rockband first came out the missus expressed a desire to learn to play the drums for real..

.. so I got her a lovely shiny set that very xmas.. proper ones too..

5 minutes..

FIVE minutes she's spent trying to drum.

oh eBay is just dangerous..keep me off there!
(wankymcwankwank Eels, tobacconists, hovercraft and bouncy bouncy., Fri 1 Oct 2010, 10:49, 2 replies)

I spent all my money on a model.
No Honda Accords story here. This particular model was entirely plastic (ah but which ones aren't you ask?).

Back in my youth at the end of a family summer holiday we went to the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune. Buoyed at the time by my summer holiday money, and having a love of all things sci-fi or flying, I went straight for the shop. As I scurried about my eye caught it, a plastic model kit of a Babylon 5 Starfury! For ages before this I'd been searching for some sort of Babylon 5 toy, but they just weren't carried in many shops...mostly because it wasn't really a 'toy' kind of show (plush Londo Mollaris are probably flying off the shelf in a parallel universe).

The only problem was the £25 price tag. But I wanted it. The parentals encouraged me to think it over, but as we traipsed around the museum my thoughts were focussed on what I'd soon be buying. My mind made up, I marched up and paid my money. It was perhaps as we were leaving that the first thread of doubt crept into my mind.

Of course by the time I got home I was beginning to regret my choice, and by the time I realised that this was a fragile plastic model and not something that suited flying around going "zoom" it was too late.

I don't think I even managed to paint it. It sat in a plastic tub for years and years, bits breaking off until I moved out and remembered what a folly it had been.

Since then I've rated every purchase, every impulse buy on the Starfury scale. It's saved me a heck of a lot of money!
(chuckle_h0und You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 10:36, 1 reply)

Banks!
Does anyone feel they would be better off somethimes keeping their money under the matress?
(bROKEN aRROW PUA HVI Master, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 10:33, 17 replies)

"Surprise your friends with a blast of air out of nowhere"
was the headline in one of those gadget magazines that caught my eye, it was an an airzooka www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH3lqTNHtZM

Now this was pre broadband days and the picture in the magazine was'nt that big so that's about as much info i could get. It was a 'bargain' price of £25 so bit the bullet and ordered one. 2 days i spent daydreaming of running around shopping centres with this in my hand shooting people with blasts of air and them looking all confused as to how this weather element could appear out of nowhere.

3 days later it arrived, the box was huge and i mean massive, had the company sent me 2 by mistake? my mind went crazy with more visions of me running around the shopping centre but now with a mate causing air havoc! I ripped open the box with haste tearing away all of the plastic packaging that was surrounding it only to discover a giant purple bucket , it was as big as a waste paper bin with a bag inside it attached to a giant rubber band! How i was i going to surprise anyone running around with a bucket in my hand and to make matters worse when you pulled back the bag it made a huge bang that would prob kill you from shock even before the air pocket hit you, that was £25 down the drain...

And to make matters worse in my excitement in getting it out of the box i tore away some of the plastic bag inside the airzooka making the thing utterley useless. Arse.
(djgalaxe, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 10:21, 7 replies)

hit and run
A few years back I attended a Unification Church conference in the states, and to my shame, as I was leaving the parking lot I accidentally ran over two of their members.

Total waste of moonies.
( rofl harris, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 9:53, Reply)

Valentine's Day.
The past two times I've had a reason to do anything for Valentine's day...I haven't. I consider it the ultimate waste of money, even money you'd normally spend on the exact same sort of thing on any other day.

My principles were long ago offended by the idea that I had to go out and buy a card, flowers, chocolates or jewellery (exercise your free will by picking two of four) on a certain day because it was expected.
I know this is an outdated rant and you've seen it before and blah blah blah card manufacturers but for the love of Christ, it really is the exact opposite of romance.
There's nothing loving and tender about doing something because you're supposed to rather than because you want to, and the unflinching automatic status of VD reduces it to having all the tender warmth of going down the shops for a pint of milk.

However, there is equally nothing romantic or loving about disappointing your loved one's expectations. The fact that you consider these expectations howl-dribblingly unreasonable is not...well it's...look, you're in a relationship with a woman here, pal, lest you forget.

Anyway, my tentative forays on this subject were met with exactly the kind of dismissal you'd expect, so I resolved to test exactly how dedicated they were to Valentine's Day at the expense of actual romance. So that's twice now that I've spent the week leading up to Feb 14th spoiling the relevant girl rotten, and then doing absolutely nothing whatsoever on the day itself. I broke out all the trappings you'd expect - wine, chocolates, candles, meals out, movies, little gifts...ect ect ect.

The first time, she twigged that something was up when I presented her with a fluffy red heart shaped cushion I'd cut and sewn myself and a bottle of wine.
"Falstaff, are you just doing this to get out of Valentine's Day?"
"Sort of. Is it working? :D"
"_{...shut up. Love you.}"
Romance ensued.

The second time, with a different Falstaffette, she threw a gigantic temper tantrum when nothing materialised on Valentine's. Pointing out all the other stuff I'd got her recently that was lying around had no effect. So, 1-1. I plan to try and score the winner some day.

Granted, I probably spent far more on this plan than I ever would have on the standard Clintons'n'Thorntons combo, but I don't consider it money wasted. Any reasonable human being would rather their boyfriend put some thought into it (number 2 wasn't a reasonable human being), which is a nice discovery to make. If I play my cards right, I may never have to do Valentine's Day again.
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 9:34, 19 replies)

I made a belt out of old one pound notes.
That turned out to be a waist of money.
(oneinthepink is at your cervix m'lady, Fri 1 Oct 2010, 9:06, 3 replies)

Gift wrapping paper
All my life I've been dutifully wrapping gifts for friends and relatives in store bought wrapping paper, and attaching a store bought card.

A couple of years ago I thought, "WTF?" I pay a ridiculous amount of money for a piece of tatt that's going to be ripped off and thrown away (or recycled by some of my relies). NO sod it, from then on I've wrapped gifts in additional gifts. Mostly tea towels and their ilk. They cost LESS than wrapping paper and are useful. And cards, forget it, I don't even send Xmas cards these days.
( Andy_Control can't be held responsible for his actions., Fri 1 Oct 2010, 1:48, 7 replies)

Laser Eye Surgery
Almost three grand down the tubes and can I see through walls? Can I eckers like.
(PCheese, Thu 30 Sep 2010, 23:42, 6 replies)

A list
IDJ2 with carry case [Turntables with an iPod dock in the middle. Entry level and the software sometimes reads the BPM wrong] - Plays static through the speakers. Sent it off to get repaired. Was 'in the shop' for 6 months. Was told '8 weeks max'. Here is an email I sent them after much to and fro-ing while it was in the shop:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Store guy's name,

I'm trying so hard to be nice. You and other dude sound like good guys. And busy. So if theres a delay in regards to me getting my IDJ2 back, tell me the real reason.

The REAL reason.

I don't care if its lost, I don't care if its broken, I don't care if some drunk guy mistook it as a toilet and took a massive dump on it.

I deal with customers all day myself. You probably dread it whenever someone calls back asking for an update and you cringe because either 1) you don't have an update or 2) you got some terrible news that they won't like. So you spin some shit.

Stop spinning shit.


lemonadegame - 3331 337 666

I'm a nice guy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Got it back without paying a cent.

Whole unit cost $600 down from $1200 [off a manager I worked for who is still awesomely supportive, even though that was two jobs ago.]
(lemonadegame, Thu 30 Sep 2010, 23:42, Reply)

My Dad
had a pretty normal job (schoolteacher), but saved and invested shrewdly throughout his career and built up quite a nest-egg.

What did he choose to invest £100,000 in just after he retired?

A mate of his (with no film-making experience) had a really good idea for an animated TV series.

No more £100,000.

Can't blame him though. The whole process of trying to get it made did sound like fun...
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Thu 30 Sep 2010, 23:18, 6 replies)