Sticker Shocks in Trichotomy

Electric future

We bought a car. A couple of months ago our car started having occasional problems - every once in a while, it would have trouble starting, and when it did start, it would get stuck in high gear. You have to turn off the engine and restart for the gear shift to work normally. La Professeure said it happened to her twice, and it happened to me once. And last month La Professeure said the car just shut down in the middle of traffic, by itself. She managed to restart the car and it worked normally after, but she is not comfortable driving it. So we brought it to the service department and they spent two weeks looking through it and found nothing wrong. La Professeure was adamant that we need a new car.

We had planned to buy an electric car next, but right now most electric cars will be able to barely get us upstate on one charge, so instead we got a plug-in hybrid.

This is a bad time to buy a car because all the prices are inflated. We ended up paying above sticker price, and our trade-in is less than a third of blue book because of the gear shift problem that Hyndai cannot diagnose.

On the bright side, it turns out La Professeure’s daily commute falls within the electric-only range of the car, so we’ve only used the gas once since we drove off the lot, and that was because we forgot to charge. La Professeure’s work has a free charging station for the staff, so we won’t need to pay for gas for her commute, which is nice.

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Homebody

I am planning out our year-end visit to Antarctica, to get flights and hotel in Argentina, but it was a shock to find that plane ticket prices to Argentina went up by 33% in the last month. I thought people are worried about a recession??

Between just coming back from central europe, this, visiting California for a wedding next spring, and an as-yet unplanned cruise with La Professeure’s parents, I think I am good with travelling for a long time now. I think we have now more than made up for the getting-stuck-at-home of the pandemic.

Next summer we are looking at swapping out our house, so we really should stay put anyway.

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Bring in the dough

I still have not heard from the education department of our company, so I assume they are not interested. But my current project is very busy, since our cloud platform team delayed their testing, and only found bugs 2 weeks before our feature goes to private preview. So I’m more busy in emergency bug-fix and release mode, and thus not as bored.

I just learned that three customers signed up for the preview, but their contracts only total a third of what I thought. I hope these contracts are just the beginning and there are more to come; I suspect it takes more than half that amount just to develop the feature, so adding on top of that sales and marketing costs, this is easily a money-losing feature.

For a company that is supposedly focusing on profit, it does not seem very wise.

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