Cheapskate Confessions: The odd couple

Does anything seem amiss with the photo above?

Maybe you can’t see clearly with all that text in the way.

Here, take another look:

It’s just an ordinary pair of work gloves that you can use for gardening or DIY.

Except one is not like the other. They’re not from the same original pair.

Now you’re probably thinking something like this to yourself:

“Ahh, nice one Alex. You’re practicing what you preach. You used it until its breaks, you sly devil you.”

Well, it’s true. They are being used until they break.

But that’s not today’s cheapskate confession.

Rather, whether we’re going for an afternoon stroll or walking to the shops, there’s plenty of opportunities to make money or save money.

For starters, you can make money by collecting bottles for profit from recycling. You can even pocket money (last year I found a $50 note on the road).

Or you can pick up various odds and ends to use later.

Like work gloves.

The quest for a perfect pair

Now, I’ve never found the perfect pair of matching gloves.

But I have found perfectly fine individual gloves on the road on in gutters that probably just fell off the back of a tradie’s ute.

And by all means, the right thing to do is pick it up before it gets swept away into a stormwater drain and is flushed out into the waterways. I’d like to think that most people would do that to be kind to the environment.

But I think fewer people would think “Hmm, that’s a nice single glove. I’ll keep that.”

I think most people would recoil at the thought of using something that’s been discarded (knowingly tossed away or unknowingly lost by mistake) by someone else.

But no one sees me wearing them. And if they did, who cares what they’d think? They wouldn’t know they were picked up off the street…