The Installment Plan
Have you ever wanted to learn how to knit? Have you ever wanted to own the most iconic cars in miniature? How about construct a model battleship? Read every important book of universal literature? Now you can. Beginning this month you can buy the first installment of any part of human knowledge at your kiosk. And, if you're a millionnaire, you can acquire every installment to its end, in about five years. I'm not kidding.
September being the month kids return to school, some adults get nostalgic. So, many pretend to be students once again and learn something new. When you go to buy the newspaper or walk by a kiosk there is the first installment of "Learn German in Two Easy Weekly Lessons" staring at you. It will probably consist of a large booklet of ten pages, and a CD or DVD that lasts fifteen minutes with two lessons. At a modical cost of maybe 1.99. That is paid for and taken home. And yes, it's easy. You have just learned how to say hello, goodbye, and thank you in German. Next week you can buy the installment with the next two lessons. So you do. But this one costs 9.99. As do the remaining forty-six. Doing some quick mental calculations, you round up to 10 euros each installment and the grand total comes out to close to five thousand euros. And you realize a correspondence school by internet will probably cost you a tenth of that amount. Or that a trip to Germany would also be cheaper.
A favorite do-it-yourself item is a dollhouse. The first installment generally brings you a little doll and maybe the front door. Until maybe after three months of buying installments you don't have anything to glue together. And when you start you have no idea where to keep the thing while you build it in your little flat. On top of the wardrobe? No, that's where the cat sleeps and it'll simply take apart what you put together. Inside the wardrobe? No, it's too small and nothing more than another pair of shoes fits in there. So maybe you keep it precariously perched on top of the kitchen cabinets until, forgotten, it crashes into the soup one day and, in a rage at yourself, you throw out maybe two hundred euros worth of glued plastic pieces.
How about books? I believe there is a new collection of books by famous philosophers. The first book costs maybe 9.95 and the rest 14.95 each. By the time you've finished plowing through the first, wishing you could dunk its clinical dryness into some hot chocolate to make it more appetizing, you realize your cup of tea is more Harlequin romance novels rather than Rhetoric by Aristotle. The problem is the three other books you managed to buy and actually spent almost forty-five euros on. But then, they'll look nice in the bookcase, and a visitor might even think you've read them all.
How could I forget the figurines! If you're an avid fan of Japanese manga and anime, you can collect all the figurines of all the manga comics of the last thirty years! So you start buying them each week. Until one night you step on one that your six-year-old son borrowed and left lying in the hallway. As your foot flies up in pain, the other foot comes down on the second figurine and you fall flat on your face. In the morning you take the figurines you've been collecting and sell them at the second-hand store down the street. Then you tell your son the figurines flew back to Japan all by themselves.
Each installment also comes wrapped in about five meters of plastic and about two square meters of cardboard. Talk about carbon footprints! All that just to contain a twenty by ten centimeter object. Or smaller. Generally, when you buy an installment, the kiosk dependent will ask you if you want them to take off all the packaging, or if you want it bent in half in a large bag, or if you want to carry the large piece of cardboard through the streets like a trophy. And once you're home, if you take the packaging with you, you fill up the trash can without bothering to separate. Because it sounds silly to recycle all that cardboard and all that plastic when it wasn't really necessary to buy any of this in the first place.
September being the month kids return to school, some adults get nostalgic. So, many pretend to be students once again and learn something new. When you go to buy the newspaper or walk by a kiosk there is the first installment of "Learn German in Two Easy Weekly Lessons" staring at you. It will probably consist of a large booklet of ten pages, and a CD or DVD that lasts fifteen minutes with two lessons. At a modical cost of maybe 1.99. That is paid for and taken home. And yes, it's easy. You have just learned how to say hello, goodbye, and thank you in German. Next week you can buy the installment with the next two lessons. So you do. But this one costs 9.99. As do the remaining forty-six. Doing some quick mental calculations, you round up to 10 euros each installment and the grand total comes out to close to five thousand euros. And you realize a correspondence school by internet will probably cost you a tenth of that amount. Or that a trip to Germany would also be cheaper.
A favorite do-it-yourself item is a dollhouse. The first installment generally brings you a little doll and maybe the front door. Until maybe after three months of buying installments you don't have anything to glue together. And when you start you have no idea where to keep the thing while you build it in your little flat. On top of the wardrobe? No, that's where the cat sleeps and it'll simply take apart what you put together. Inside the wardrobe? No, it's too small and nothing more than another pair of shoes fits in there. So maybe you keep it precariously perched on top of the kitchen cabinets until, forgotten, it crashes into the soup one day and, in a rage at yourself, you throw out maybe two hundred euros worth of glued plastic pieces.
How about books? I believe there is a new collection of books by famous philosophers. The first book costs maybe 9.95 and the rest 14.95 each. By the time you've finished plowing through the first, wishing you could dunk its clinical dryness into some hot chocolate to make it more appetizing, you realize your cup of tea is more Harlequin romance novels rather than Rhetoric by Aristotle. The problem is the three other books you managed to buy and actually spent almost forty-five euros on. But then, they'll look nice in the bookcase, and a visitor might even think you've read them all.
How could I forget the figurines! If you're an avid fan of Japanese manga and anime, you can collect all the figurines of all the manga comics of the last thirty years! So you start buying them each week. Until one night you step on one that your six-year-old son borrowed and left lying in the hallway. As your foot flies up in pain, the other foot comes down on the second figurine and you fall flat on your face. In the morning you take the figurines you've been collecting and sell them at the second-hand store down the street. Then you tell your son the figurines flew back to Japan all by themselves.
Each installment also comes wrapped in about five meters of plastic and about two square meters of cardboard. Talk about carbon footprints! All that just to contain a twenty by ten centimeter object. Or smaller. Generally, when you buy an installment, the kiosk dependent will ask you if you want them to take off all the packaging, or if you want it bent in half in a large bag, or if you want to carry the large piece of cardboard through the streets like a trophy. And once you're home, if you take the packaging with you, you fill up the trash can without bothering to separate. Because it sounds silly to recycle all that cardboard and all that plastic when it wasn't really necessary to buy any of this in the first place.
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