Cheap and Recycled Gifts at Christmas

The holiday season, the season of giving. My dad is famous for his cheap gifts. I say cheap, I mean free. Among past gifts are what he calls "Road Kill Tools". When out walking, he gleans the roadside for tools that have fallen off of pickup trucks. Sockets, screwdrivers, you name it. I have gotten slightly dinged craftsman and snap-on sockets this way. I suspect that he keeps the good ones, and only gives Road Kill Tools to me if he has duplicates. Another memorable gift on Christmas was a gold colored coin holder that he picked up at good will. I was less than impressed with the coin holder, so the next year he re-wrapped it and gave it to me again at Christmas. He figured I might enjoy it more the second time.

Several years ago, he gave me a combo "Radio Update Clock" and indoor outdoor thermometer from Radio Shack. What impressed me the most was that the gift was still in the original box, unopened. The box didn’t have tire marks on it either. All was well until half way through the first week using the clock. It tended to run precisely one hour off, I mean one hour, to the exact second. It is excellent for setting the second hand on the LiberalCCW wristwatch, but if you want to know if it is 7:00 or 8:00 PM, you have to look outside and check the position of the sun. Now having a clock that is correct at random times means you have to have a second clock to verify that the first one is showing the correct time. I tend to use the radio update clock to judge how many minutes are left until the next hour, whatever hour that may be. As my wife and I still use the thermometer, I am tempted to stick a piece of tape with a large question mark over the hour display on the clock so it would display ?:53. Right now, the clock is displaying 5:06:44 and the correct time is 6:06:44.

My dad also gave me the LiberalCCW watch, as a gift, after he got a "different" watch. After several weeks of using it, I discovered the reason he got a new watch: The buttons on the side of the LiberalCCW watch are too sensitive. If you breath on it, the watch buttons will depress and switch the watch into one of seemingly hundreds of useless modes. I look at the watch face and it is displaying phone numbers, then 5 minutes later, it is displaying the lap times of my last 9 arm flexes. As I write this the watch displays: "Chrono 74:31:27", and has been counting for the last 74 hours, apparently. I can never get the LiberalCCW watch back into the time display from these modes, so if I am at home, I look at the radio clock and see: ?:32:25 and then I look outside at the sun and figure it must be 7:32:25 on the dot.

My question to you is this: Who is the bigger tightwad? Is it the father who gives cheap or nonworking Christmas gifts, or the son who would rather tell time using a clock, a watch and the sun rather than buy a watch at Wal-Mart for five bucks?