There are rules to live by, and mostly they’re pretty universal.

Some our parents teach us, like that touching a hot stove is a bad idea.

Others are taught to us as part of the Social Contract, like signaling before changing lanes (To be honest, where I live, an alarming majority of drivers haven’t heard about that last one).

However, many other rules to live by have to be self-taught.

Mark Twain said, “A man who picks up a cat by the tail learns something that he can learn no other way.

Or, as I often say “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”

There’s one rule that I sometimes forget, and when I do I regret it. When it comes to purchasing decisions, Buy What You Want The First Time.

A while back I had technical difficulties with a video scaler I had bought for my Media Room. Long story short, it was an inexpensive product; I had decided to cheap out and not buy what I really wanted, which was a scaler from DVDO.

It didn’t seem like such a good deal once the problems started.

To their credit, the help desk of the other manufacturer (who shall go nameless), was extremely helpful, but I experienced a cascade of issues that was almost comically large, including one replacement unit (of several) that bricked completely.

I’ll give them props for taking customer service seriously, but it really was a terrible product.

Eventually, I smartened up, and realized that my sunk costs included not only hours and hours of my time, but nearly two hundred dollars in shipping costs sending defective units back.

This is how I felt:

 

I realized that I was throwing good money after bad, and ordered a DVDO Edge from their Canadian distributor, which is what I had wanted in the first place..

Short term cost savings aren’t worth the time, money, and aggravation of trying fix problems.

If you compromise, and don’t buy what you really want, you’re not going to be satisfied.