Buyers remorse

Through the years I have spent countless amounts of money buying stuff for my children with no true regret for the expenditure. In fact, I usually have very little problem spending money on other people, but as soon as I spend money on myself I begin to regret it. In fact, more often than not I have to talk myself into keeping the item.

Take for instance this past Friday. For the past week or so, I have been trying to get a wireless data card to work in the back of beyond area in which I live. Now in defense of Sprint's Overdrive it was very nifty and it is probably not it's fault that it couldn't find a signal, but that still didn't solve my problem. Well long story short, I took the Overdrive back to Best Buy where the people in the Mobile department were great. They refunded my money and reinstated my upgrade for that phone line. Yes, this is very unusual especially when one takes into consideration the notoriously unhelpful customer service for which Best Buy is well know for.

So I was feeling so good about that encounter that I looked around in the computer area. I had been considering purchasing a HP through an online program I have access to at work and wanted to see how close to the price Best Buy could get. Well they didn't have the HP I was looking at but they did have a very nice Toshiba Satellite A660. Well roughly $850 later I walk out of Best Buy with the laptop, a case and a wireless HP printer, copier, scanner.

One would think that this would be enough wouldn't one? Well no not for this intrepid buyer. You see I still had the problem of being able to access Internet in the back of beyond. All of the techy people at Sprint said that since I used to get good service when I was able to tether my Blackberry (evil cell phone companies, they don't let you do this anymore) that I should be able to get service with an Evo. Of course, Evo's are like gold and nobody has them in stock. Sprint has figured away around that. In their full service stores, they are allowing customer to pre-pay for the phone and then when "your" phone comes in they call. Of course the price is a little higher, but that will be another debate when the phone comes in. The guy at the store assured me that the phone would be at the store in less than a week. I'm guessing that I will get a call on Thursday (see technically less than a week).

So now, I have spent way more money than I intended and am not feeling all that great about it. When I got home, I had all but decided to return the laptop. I wasn't even going to take it out of the box. After talking to a few people I realized, one "Hey, I deserve it" and two "Hey, I don't really own the computer I use (it's a loaner from work). What the heck am I going to do if they ask for the computer back? Also, really if I didn't buy the computer, odds are that one of my children would have some sort of emergency and there would go that money. So yes, I do have buyers remorse and yes, I'm still not completely happy that I spent this kind of money but I'm trying to convince myself that I should be happy about having these cool new toys because really I probably do deserve to spend money on myself with out too many regrets.