The Weekend Assignment is posted each Friday at Outpost Mâvarin; a roundup of responses goes up the following Thursday, so if you’d like to join in, you’ve still got some time. Karen says: Don’t worry if you don’t get your entry in by the end of the weekend. It’s called the Weekend Assignment because John Scalzi originally designed it to give folks something to write on weekends, but times have changed since then. Now the meme is launched on Thursday nights / Friday mornings, just a little later than Scalzi used to post it, and you have a whole week to respond. Still, I for one am grateful if you don’t all wait until the last minute!
Weekend Assignment #224: What’s the worst idea you ever had? Amuse us with a story of a cunning plan that produced less than stellar results. (If your worst idea was positively traumatic, you can tell of your unamusing disaster, or downgrade to a more benign bad idea you had.)
The tricky thing I’ve noticed about most of my bad ideas is that they usually start out as “it seemed like a good idea at the time” ideas. I think that if it’s immediately recognizable as a bad idea, I usually know better than to follow through on it.
I would love to share a story of a good idea at the time that went spectacularly wrong, but I can’t really think of one. I don’t flatter myself to think that means I’ve never had one – it’s just that I can’t remember any. It could be they just weren’t memorable, or it could be that I’ve repressed the memories.
I’ve had a few cooking disasters – recipes that didn’t work out due to bad ingredient or equipment substitutions, usually – but none really stand out. But aside from that, most of the experiences that I can think of in the bad-ideas category involve poor choices about how to use my money in one way or another.
My family has at times referred to me as a “clotheshorse,” and I don’t deny it – I enjoy clothes and shoes, and like shopping for them almost as much as I do for books. But I’ve bought my share of things that were just right for a particular moment, and then were never quite right to wear for anything else. I’ve bought things without being exactly sure what I’d wear them for – they just appealed to me aesthetically, or something. However, the most annoying examples are the clothes that really didn’t seem like a good idea at the time, but I bought them anyway – the color wasn’t especially flattering, the fit wasn’t just right, something about the style wasn’t ideal, but I was sure I’d make it work one way or another. I wore it once or twice, and it really didn’t work after all – those are the “I should have known better” purchases. Fortunately, I’m a bargain-minded clotheshorse and I don’t care much about labels, but it’s still wasted money.
A bigger, more generalized waste of money is how I’d describe some of my spending habits and patterns – not only those involving clothes shopping – during the first couple of years after my divorce. One would think an accountant, of all people, should know and do better, but I can tell you that it’s not necessarily so (not all from my own experience, either). First Husband and I were always never-carry-a-balance-on-our-credit-cards people, and I intended to stay the same way when I was single. I had a decent job and was supporting myself, but I also didn’t have to answer for or explain my decisions to anyone else for the first time in my adult life. I started off my single life with a respectable nest egg, but within a couple of years the egg was pretty well cracked. Part of that was due to factors that I didn’t cause – my ex-husband and I were sued over undisclosed termite damage by the people who bought our old house (for the record, we didn’t KNOW, so we COULDN’T have disclosed, and the house WAS inspected and under a termite contract – so they sued the pest-control company too), and there were costs associated with responding to that, of course. However, it apparently didn’t dawn on me that even if you’re paying off your credit cards every month, when you regularly have to transfer money out of your savings to do that, you are just spending too much. Once cash got tight, I made the deliberate choice to carry a balance on one credit card…and that really didn’t help the big picture, as you might guess. I’m not going to share the details of how that situation got worse before it got better – because they aren’t just mine, and the resolution involves serendipity and unexpected windfalls – but it did ultimately get better. My mission now is to recognize a bad idea as a bad idea, and make sure I don’t wind up back in the same place again.
I’m sure that the other Weekend Assignment participants have far more interesting and colorful answers to this week’s question than I have, so you might want to click the link above and go read some of those. If you’d care to share some of your own bad ideas that seemed like good ones at the time, I’d love to know about them in the comments!
Oh boy, if I wrote about cooking disasters my post would be endless. 🙂
Glad everything worked out for you. I think most people have been in situations like that. I know we were after I went back to school.
Mike – Yeah, me too. I wish I would have had something more humorous for this assignment, though.
Your response is definitely more interesting than mine (even if it was actually your brother’s idea :-).)
John’s theory is that whenever there is money, a disaster comes along to eat it up. I’m glad things are better now for you! Oh, the stories I could tell of a financial bad idea or two…or three!
Karen – I think John is right about that, sadly; it’s the “one step up and two steps back” principle. I think it gets under my skin a little more because – well, I’m an accountant, so I keep thinking I should be better at this.