Mostly Useless Inovation

Now, watch in amazement as I proceed to post while totally ignoring the fact that I haven’t done so for nearly one full month! Although I must admit, when I started blogging, I said to my self, “Self, there’s no way in heck you’re going to go one full month without posting, got it?” and I was like, “Yeah me talking to myself, I hear you. Loud and clear.” (It should be noted here that I consider one month to be approximately 32 days, thus I am still inside the set parameters.)

If you’re like me, and I gather that most of you are, then you like to save money and spend a lot of it at once. I am constantly exploring ways to do both things at the same time. It usually proves to be quite a chore. Saving money and spending a lot at the same time is a lot harder than in sounds. In an effort to accomplish what I call “Speaving” money, I recently stumbled across an ingenious idea. It’s kind of tricky, but see if you can follow along.

Step one is the purchase of a home. The market right now is not very buyer friendly, but I have the feeling that will change soon enough. Give it about 5 years or so, then start looking for a house to buy. There are a few crucial elements to the house that you’ll want to be aware of. One thing you’re going to want is a nice tall tree in the backyard. The bigger the better. Another is to make sure that the power lines lead into the house from the roof. That is a must.

Step two is to immediately stop paying attention to that large tree in the backyard. Treat it almost as if it doesn’t exist. Don’t water it, don’t prune it and certainly do not name it. If anyone suggest that you give it a name, smack them square in the mouth and say, “Don’t you see what I’m trying to accomplish here?!!?” Then stop inviting that friend over, or, if it was a family member, move them into the garage, make them sleep on an old army cot with wobbly legs and feed them through a slot in the door. If the neighbors or the police ask you about why you have that relative locked up in the garage, just say, “Who? Him? Oh, that’s just an animatronic robot I made myself with some parts I bought at radio shack. Yeah, by trade I’m a robot designer. That’s just a little home project I’m working on. I think that someday the market for pretending you have you’re very own prisoner is going to be extremely high, that’s why I’ve programmed him to whine and complain and say things like, ‘Help me! I’m trapped in here!! Won’t somebody please let me out of this hellish dark dungeon?!!?’ Pretty cool, huh?” 99% of the time they will agree with you and give you some suggestions as to what else the prisoner should do, like, scrape at the walls or pound on the door, you know, regular prisoner type things.

Step three is to wait about 10-15 years and then plant some tree killing weed/vine to grow around the tree and choke it to death. This isn’t too complicated. Often times it will grow on its own. If you neglect your yard long enough, you’d be surprised what kinds of odd things spring up. Not to mention a whole new slew of creatures that will move in and make nests. And sometimes you get really lucky and one of those creatures will wander into your garage, make a nest in some plastic bags, suffocate itself, create the most horrific smell your nostrils have ever encountered with its dead and decaying carcass and you won’t be able to figure out what the hell it is for a good 6 or 7 months, then it will go away almost as mysteriously as it came. About a year after that, you will be cleaning your garage and happen across the dead animal. I urge you to resist vomiting on the spot, but it’s almost inevitable that you will. Just remember not to toss your cookies on your mom’s collection of old Elvis\Beatles records. That’s key. Write that down somewhere. At this point in time it would be advantageous of you to actually have animatronic robot building skills as you will have no desire whatsoever to remove the dead animal from the garage. And it will be imperative that you remove all dead things from the garage.

Step four is to wait. This is probably the hardest part. You should be about 17 or 18 years at least into the Speaving process. Make no mistake though, not once single cent has been speaved. That glorious moment has yet to come. It took me almost exactly 20 years to speave as much money as I did, but it was well worth the wait. Basically, you’ve neglected the large tree so much that a good gust of wind is all that it will take to knock it over. You are waiting for that gust of wind to knock the tree over onto the power lines and take them out. Here’s where the speavings begin. If all goes according to plan, the tree will knock out your power, that’s the savings part. And if the tree falls properly, when it takes out the power lines, it will also rip apart the socket where the power enters the house. This is where the spending begins. If you are lucky, the socket located in your house will be an original (and if you did this right, your house was built in the 50’s or earlier) and pretty much nobody will have a replacement for it. We didn’t get that lucky. Unfortunately for us, we found some electrician who happened to have the parts. Had we been lucky, we would have had to go to the city, get a permit for a new meter box and updated socket install, hire a professional to install the new equipment and then get the power company to turn the power back on. That would have meant at least 1 full week without electricity. Imagine the savings!! Not to mention the spending!! Permits aren’t cheap, and neither is the labor it would cost to install all the new equipment. Then there’s the bonus of having half your wall ripped out, I can’t forget to mention that. As it stands, we were only without electricity for 3 days, but all in all, there was some good speaving to be had.

So that’s how you speave money. I look forward to hearing if anyone else has some good ways to speave money or if they want to try out my technique. I’d love to hear how it works for someone else.

*note from the author: Ok, so this happened at my parents house, so I guess I should give them proper recognition for their part in helping me to develop this great way to speave money. Without them, none of this would have been possible.

Well, here we are near the end of the post… funny, I thought there would be more trumpets sounding and wild cheering… it looks like my fortune cookie was wrong. I would also like to say thanks to everyone that continues to stop by here, hoping that I’ll post something new, useless and almost completely unfunny. You guys are troopers and deserve some recognition. Virtual high fives all around!!