Losing Expensive Gear
This may sound funny. You don't tend to lose $300.00 knives.
Many years ago I had a problem with disappearing pens. You know, little BIC stick pens, or their Paper Mate equivalents. Your standard 25-cent pen (in 1975). I did all kinds of things, notches, special marks, initials. Pens would just walk off. People would claim that the pen they were using was theirs. The end of the pen would be missing, right where my notch or mark or initials would have been.
Yeah, I know. Stupid, really. Cheap pens. But still . . .
So one day I dug up my $5.00 Parker pen. It didn't match anything else on anyone else's desk. No amount of defacement would render it "plausibly common." It was strangely immune from "borrowing" and disappearance. It was always right where I left it.
But there was something else.
In those days, five bucks was a lot for a pen. That alone made people think twice. It was unique in that setting, which made it impossible to swipe, bite off the end, and shrug that "this one's mine." Yes, that was all good, and made it dramatically less likely that it would wander off.
The "something else," however, was in the way I regarded the pen. I'd spent real money on it, and I no longer left it casually lying around. I would no longer scribble some note and drop the pen on the desk. Now, it would go back in my pocket. Always. It didn't matter that it was now a low theft risk. It mattered that I placed more value on it.
Before long, I had switched from cheap writing
instruments of any kind to those more costly,
more durable, more valuable, and worth keeping
and caring for.
(I have a Parker 51, for those of
you who remember what that is.) |
|
It changed the way I shopped for a number of things, including knives. When I went shopping for the "gentleman's knife" to replace the SAK I was retiring, I didn't wander in and ask myself, "
what knife can I buy that I won't mind losing?" Instead, the thinking was more along the lines of, "
what can I afford that I'll be willing to carry from here on out?"
I broke the tip off that new knife (Gerber
Silver Knight)in the first couple of months I had it. I took it back to the knife shoppe to see what could be done. The guy carefully ground and polished a new tip for me. If you don't hold it up next to a brand new one, you really can't tell that the point isn't the original.
And I still have that knife. Hey, in 1982, forty bucks was a meaningful amount of money.
Nowadays, when I shop for a knife, I try to get the best quality I can afford, rather than the best bargain available.
It's a lot easier to keep a knife when you actually value it.
That's my mileage. Yours may vary.
