That’s 50 hours of driving at 60mph. Or 100 hours at 30mph. Per week. I drive machinery for a living and consider 100 hours in the saddle to be a busy month. It’s a wonder he has time to do whatever his real business is. Or even to eat & sleep. Unless maybe he gets them with like 2800 & just has to bump them to 3000.
My very absent-minded 20-something niece lived with us for a year. During that time she heard about those things and bought a package of however many. Which package she lost before she could get them configured with her phone. Oops.
Full disclosure: her second package fared better and has since saved her bacon more times than I can know.
(Slight hijack regarding mixdenny’s son’s job) It’s very common practice for car manufacturers. I had a friend who got a job driving I think Nissans round and round a race track for six hours every night. It paid well but he said it was severely boring. At least the Cadillac driver was getting to get out and about.
I’m been puzzling this all morning. All I can come up with is the cars aren’t selling for full price. They want to cut the price but not ruin the market (can’t let the word get out that you can buy one $5,000 below list price or whatever) so they sell them as slightly used at a discount and the “new car price” doesn’t take a hit.
I bought the first Apple Watch, on a whim, to see if it would be a fit for me.
Up till then I had always had a Swiss watch on my wrist–either an Omega Speedmaster Pro or a Rolex Submariner.
I never imagined how nice it would be to have my emails and texts come in on my wrist, and to have my runs all tracked. Then they added GPS, made it waterproof, and added cellular.
My Swiss watches have been in the box for years, with occasional usage when I want to look nice in public (i.e. not used at all in 2020).
Or maybe some regulatory or contractual thing where if the car has 3K on the clock they can get a rebate from the manufacturer because now they have to sell it as a “used” car or maybe they can take an inventory tax deduction for impaired value.
My Amazon Echo aka Alexa. I got it free with my Sirius subscription. I use it daily. She is my alarm clock, she plays ambient sound when I need it to sleep. Those nagging questions that pop into your mind at random times? She always has the answer. She uses all of my entertainment options, pod casts, music, pretty much everything.
I don’t have a garage attached to my house - and I still have a front door lock that offers an upgrade that will allow me to lock and unlock the door remotely. It also allows me to give people electronic keys with restrictions so I can give the housecleanier a key that only works on Wednesday , or the person renting my Air BNB a key that works from check in time Thursday to checkout Friday, without having to give them and get back a physical key. You might not see/have any reason to want to let someone into your house when you aren’t there - but that doesn’t mean no one does.
Having had a couple of back injuries over the years, I’m finding the heated seats in my new car to be the neatest thing since sliced bread. Especially when I crank the lumbar support to the max and the heat really starts to soak in…ahhh! Blessed relief.
His real job is a courier! He delivers medical supplies (including live specimens on ice) from one hospital to another. A couple of weeks ago he delivered an entire body for research although he had a company van for that delivery. One of his common routes is Cleveland to Chicago, another to the Carolinas. He is on call all the time. As I wrote, he is allowed to drive the Caddys for this business.
Apparently the cars can only be sold as “used” after 3000 miles. They are often already being sold and transfer right away when he returns them. He doesn’t have to drive a whole 3000 miles as they already have mileage on them from demonstrations and “loaner” service. Typically he has to add 1000 to 1500 miles. And as I mentioned, anything over 3000 is fine. And he gets paid for this as well. When he returns the car he gets a pre-paid Visa with the agreed amount. He often calls us and says, “Hey, I just got a (high end model), let’s go to lunch.”.
Yeah, I know. I wouldn’t believe this either unless I knew this first (second) hand.
There’s a retired guy in my building who makes some side money delivering commercial vehicles like box trucks, plumber’s or utility trucks, and even occasionally dump trucks. A surprising number of those are sold at long distance. So some local truck customizer / completer company pays him to drive it to wherever the customer wants it then buys him an airline ticket back home. Lather rinse repeat.
Logical enough once he explained it, but it’s another of those tiny niche jobs you wouldn’t think of out of the blue.
Of the car technologies, keyless entry and pushbutton start by far. I, too, thought it was silly, then got a new car with keyless entry when I had my second child and lord knows how much easier it made getting the kids, the groceries, everything in and out of the car and not fumbling for keys with one hand all the time. I can’t imagine going back to a keyed system.
My wife’s car has the back-up camera. Meh. Don’t really care about it. It’s nice, I suppose, but for parallel parking I don’t use it except for fine-tuning at the very end.
Heated and cooled seats? Also a bit meh from me. Once again, that’s in my wife’s car. Chalk them up in the “nice, I suppose, but I don’t really care” category. Keyless doors/ignition, though, big plus.
A webcamera. Yeah, I know – it’s freaking 2021, but I only literally just bought my first webcam for my desktop a few months ago. I had it on my laptop and phone, of course, because they come with it, but now that I have it on my desktop, I find myself using it more regularly, and I kinda like it.
I have a lifelong hatred of laptops. I never wanted to own one myself. In fact, when I interviewed for the new job I just started a couple of weeks ago, they even offered to buy me a laptop, but I declined, because I would much rather use my much more powerful, much more capable giant desktop behemoth for work.
However, I didn’t appreciate how much work I would actually suddenly find myself with; because in addition to the new job (work from home, with a move to a new city in my future!), my old job just got a PPP loan and also wants my assistance with a lot of projects that, basically, I am the ONLY person with the knowledge to do; so now I’m working TWO full-time jobs after nearly a year of barely working at all.
Enter the Chromebook. For $200, I have a laptop that weighs nearly nothing, with a battery that so far lasts at LEAST 8 hours on a charge, and allows me to keep working no matter where I am. I just hook up to whatever computer I need with Chrome Remote Desktop (I use three different PCs for work, depending on which task and which company I’m doing work for at that moment) and work; even though I’m still ‘working’, it feels like a break when I move to my bed and work a few hours before falling asleep.
Sure, I’m sure everybody that normally uses a laptop thinks “No shit!”, but I am surprised how much I went from never wanting a laptop to “this is the best purchase I have ever made”.
And I know it has been mentioned, but I’ll throw in another vote for Instant Pot. Figured it was marketing hype, but… no, it is an EXCELLENT kitchen appliance.
