My budget is going to blow up today so thought I’d write a note on this before the spending report comes out later.
My microwave packed up last week—it would just whirl around but not heat anything.
I thought about how I should approach this. On the one hand, I’m trying not to use microwaves anymore anyway. There’s a debate about whether they are good for you and whether they ruin the nutrients in the food by nature of how they work and the things in which you heat the food in. Suffice it to say after reading around a little bit, I would opt to forgo a microwave but I just don’t feel I can do so right now. To do that, I would need to have a fully functioning kitchen otherwise, which I just don’t have right now.
So I decided that I would carry on using a microwave for the time being, which meant I needed to either get this one repaired or buy a new one.
I debated those two options for a while. I estimated the repair would come in about £100 (labour and small part) and a good replacement (given I wanted a combination microwave oven) would come in at £310.
I decided to go down the repair route for cost reasons, got someone round to look at it but after their assessment they concluded I’d need to fork out for replacement transformer and magnetron (and potentially motherboard) which could total around £270+. That obviously would not be worth it compared to buying a new one so I decided to scrap the repair and buy a new one. The annoying thing is having to part with £80 for a call out charge for 15 minutes work just to find that out. My total cost then for the microwave solution comes up to £390.
That is annoying. I could have probably chosen a cheaper microwave, opted for a used one from Marketplace or something but I didn’t want the hassle of getting something that I wouldn’t be happy with and given I’d already lost £80 trying to fix this, I thought I’d just bite the bullet and buy the new one.
I ordered one today and it should come tomorrow. I could have waited till the end of the month as per my proposed policy but I didn’t want to keep standing over a pan to warm leftovers for the rest of the month. It’s all the price you pay for convenience.
I could have made better decisions about this but I think I got impatient and just made rash decisions given I hate preparing food and just want to make the process as frictionless as possible so that I can get on with other things.
Anyway, the money is now spent, it will show up in today’s performance report and I’ll have to massage the budget in retrospect to make it work.
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