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2011 Jetta TDI. Newly married, my husband has a weakness for shiny new things. He had a 2008 Jetta and wanted to sell it and “upgrade” to the more efficient and environmentally friendly (er, about that) TDI. A few years later we bought a second TDI.
If you’re not familiar with Dieselgate, well, yeah, we got defrauded basically. Long story short, we ended up selling both and replacing them with…
Teslas. Sigh. Fuck me.
Well, that's some luck you've had.
I've actually thought about looking for an old TDI, since it's a bit different, more resistant to American trade issues and possibly in my budget. If you're in a rural area it actually is greener, too.
An Intel Atom notebook with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage acquired for $200 on Black Friday. Despite many attempts to optimize it, it was practically unusable 4 years in. If I had the foresight to buy a used ThinkPad for the same price instead, it could have been my daily driver to this day.
Also a faux leather wallet. The "leather" started turning to goo and powder about a year in. Some of my cards and my wallet photo still have some of those decayed fake leather bits stuck on the edges or rubbed in.
I have an irrational hatred for faux leather I won’t touch anything with it that melty And peely texture is so awful
I got a saddleback wallet for Father’s Day 10 years ago and it is gorgeous. If it ever dies and they still exist they’ll replace or repair it for free
Hm, no, I can't imagine that I've ever experienced a worse purchasing regret than the one you described there with the pizza.
My brain is too scattered to think of biggest, but most recently was ordering anything from the cheap Chinese food place! Cheap! Mostly tasty!
Also gave me something that made me so sick for 2 weeks and unable to keep other food down I had to get an xray to make sure everything was okay! Ultimately it was but man! Bad two weeks!
Got an expensive leather jacket as a kid, for far more money than I had paid for clothes before or have since. Assumed it was indestructible being leather. It was not that kind of leather jacket, and I managed to tear it wide open in maybe a couple weeks.
Rent every month. The scam eventually ends so at least it won't be forever. It just lasts the rest of my life.
iPhone 3G. Awful performance, even worse battery life, no multitasking, next to no storage space, couldn't do shit without iTunes, and even with iTunes the options were severely limited. Overpriced locked down piece of shit. Streamlined UI was pretty much the only good thing about it. Got an android phone not long after and it was like night and day.
I cancelled my contract early to train in my 3G for a “DROID” and never looked back.
Those Samsung earbuds which had a proprietary connector from back when every phone manufacturer refused to use 3.5mm plugs to push their own breakable standard.
Oh boys, there are too many. The most recent is the iPad though
2012 Indian Scout. The price was decent, the miles were low. It was my first motorcycle, and I was sure that I wanted a cruiser. It seemed perfect for me.
It had some pretty major issues. The stator failed in the rain; it got fixed under warranty. Then a coil pack failed, stranding me two hours from home. That took about a month to get fixed under warranty. It wouldn't start in cold weather worth a damn; anything under 50F, and it was a bitch to start. To top it off, I live in the mountains, and once I got past my initial trepidation of riding without anything but skill and luck between myself and the pavement, I was out-riding the capabilities of a cruiser. It's really unpleasant to drop into a corner and get your foot knocked off the foot peg because it's dragging on the pavement...
It turns out that the way I ride is much more suited to a sport bike.
I did a title swap with someone that had a '12 CBR600RR that needed some work; I took about a $5000 bath on that trade, but I got a bike that I loved. I ended up putting 80,000 miles on it before I wore the engine out, and then bought a '16 Triumph Speed Triple that I rode to work today.
Many years ago I paid 170 dollars for a forever license to what was essentially a VPN that only worked for netflix.
The company got shut down several months later and I could no longer see netflix from around the world.
Now days I don't even have netflix though
I took a similar risk with Bean (a Lemmy app for iOS). It was all good for the lifetime of the company. Turns out, it wasn’t very long.
Airport Sandwich €12 and it tastes like gas station sandwich.
From the hitchkikers guide:
It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins they are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.
If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone, among his cats on a back stair in Stepney. The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.
My spouse and I were broke grad students with a baby on the way. We needed a car. Someone in our tiny town was selling a 1992 Accord for $1000 (this was in the early 2010s). We bought it and put in another $1000 to get it to run.
The only problem? It was a stick shift. I didn't know how to drive standard; at the time, my spouse didn't drive at all. I tried to learn, but I was so nauseated from my pregnancy that I nearly puked every time the car lurched... which was often. I never did get the hang of it. Eventually we bought a newer automatic car and traded the Accord in for a whopping $250.
These days we could weather a $2000 mistake without too many problems, but back then... yeah, that one hurt.
I took my car into the dealership for a full work-up and diagnostic in January, roughly $1k… mentioning the light and the recall I had heard about. Well, they said everything was good and unless I brought the car in with the light on they couldn’t do anything about it or the recall. Days later, the light came back on driving home early from work. So, I head right there, while the engine is stuttering and fighting to make it across town. There isn’t any availability until end of the following week…
I go across town to a hole in the wall mechanic and get seen immediately. They diagnose a cracked head gasket and blown radiator pretty quickly, order a new engine because it’s like $375 and under $2k to install. Done by Monday.
I originally went to the dealership. I explained the problem, the cars keep a warning light log that they can access… and they missed the obvious issues but still charged me $1k for work that didn’t matter my more, because I got an entirely new engine and radiator.
Sounds like a stealership
>$1500 on an all new parts DIY PC complete with a Windows license. Nowadays everything's outdated and these same parts would be like $800 max. Even back then I could have saved at least a couple hundred just by swallowing my pride and buying used.
I haven't bought brand new tech since, and I have not regretted it yet.
Samsung A03.
After years of buying the cheapest phones possible, i got really tired of it and spent more money to get a better one, hoping to finally be free of all the bullshit.
It's the worst phone i've ever owned.
Cost me 100€ second hand instead of the ususal 50€. I am so disgusted
If you still are using it, try this:
Got just a bit more performance out of a friend's A03s that way.
Oh wow, i wasn't expecting helpful advice for that specific model. Thanks!