August 22, 2005 – Life as a Subscription Model

August 22, 2005 – Life as a Subscription Model

I spent the weekend “puttering around the house,” taking care of all those little things you tend to put off doing, especially if you have something more important to do like watch a movie, sleep in late, spend time shopping for items you really don’t need but have to have. I’ve had more important things to do for most of this year, but this weekend I decided to do those chores I had been putting off. One of the reasons for my change in priorities was my car started having mechanical problems on Thursday and I put it in the shop early Friday morning. My daily routine had been disrupted and mentally I had to rearrange my schedule for the next several days awaiting the outcome of the car repair. Something serious would mean the end of shopping for items I really didn’t need as well as other activities that required discretionary spending—some car repairs can end up costing the equivalent of a big screen TV. And after the expenditure the only thing you have to show for it is what you come to expect every day—the ability to drive to and from work in some degree of comfort though the drive will probably be anything but comforting. We live in an age of tolls that we pay each day of our lives.

They are the little tolls that none of us notice: on our way to work the Starbuck latte, the bear claw from the Boulanger on South Market Street near the intersection with San Fernando Street in San Jose (my personal favorite), the bagel at Noah’s Bagels. Then there are the subscriptions that we willingly pay because we have to have cell phones—in addition to the land line we have at home—cable TV with premium channels, high-speed Internet access, and new to both my wife IM and I, Netflix, and new to me Simply Audiobooks. Our cars fit into this category since the vast majority of households buy cars on credit, a monthly expense, fill the gas tank regularly—in the Bay Area a once a week (if not more often) expense, and there are the repairs as I experienced this past week, that happen at irregular intervals—though the regularly scheduled maintenance happens in intervals of miles or months and my car has an indicator that reminds me when service is due. The other tolls, of course, include our daily bread, groceries every week (if not more often), meals purchased at restaurants—daily in the case of those who buy lunch, weekly or more often during the week for dinners out rather than eaten at home. Taken as a whole, we’re part of a constantly flowing stream of money, receiving it at monthly, twice monthly, every other weekly, or some other interval and sending it along at the intervals just described for the subscriptions of our lives.

What got me on this tirade was my routine being disrupted and my changing priorities to complete long neglected chores about the house. Chores are another form of toll extracted from all of us. There was a time in my life when I did all the service on my car, changing oil, replacing brakes shoes, replacing points and plugs and tuning the engine afterwards—some impossible to do today thanks to the electronics found in all cars built in the past decade or more. My father for the longest time didn’t own a car model any older than 1970—he’s since come around to the realization that cars are transportation not a hobby. What I’m saying in a very round about way is that so much of our lives have been changed to the subscription model I described. I have a lawn service that takes care of my lawn (automatic sprinklers water the lawn). IM has a maid service to clean the house. Appliances are serviced, whenever required and we’re outraged if a repair is ever needed—we’ve had washers, dryers, refrigerators and electric ranges that have operated without problems for 10 to 15 years or more. The same applies to home electronics though we’re apt to change TVs, home audio, computers, video games and personal electronics at much shorter intervals because of technology obsolescence. I laugh at store salesmen trying to sell me extended warranties on products that will be replaced well before anything fails.

The chores we’re left to do are the small things that are not worth calling someone else to take care of, as I was confronted with this weekend: repairing a noisy gate, catching a gopher that has been burrowing tunnels all over my front lawn, replacing wood chips in the flower beds of our small gardens in the front lawn, repairing a faulty gas barbecue grill, and cleaning up the oil drippings on the garage floor left by car that I picked up from the shop at noon on Saturday. My car is seven years old and had close to 120,000 miles on it. The cassette player doesn’t work and I haven’t replace it because the CD player is fine, a row of LEDs in the indicator for my sound system is out; the result is the numbers and letters in the display are not fully formed, though I can interpret the meaning just fine. My wife IM wants me to trade the car in but I’m kind of fond of it and the older I get, the more attached I’m becoming to things. I’ll trade it in but not just yet.

Like the steady stream of money that comes in and goes out, life is a continuous flow of regularly occurring events that give us all a sense of normalcy in our lives: five days of commuting to work, two days of weekend, the arrival of expected holidays—I’m looking forward to Labor Day, the regularly scheduled events associated with work—the closing of the quarter—lots of activity then its aftermath—a couple of days of getting the adrenalin back up, the out of town travel—never completely predictable but occurring at intervals during the year nonetheless. The older I get the more predictable becomes the pattern of recurring events and the more I have to improvise on the pattern to keep myself interested in staying in this bucket brigade of life.