The Cost

Thousands of years ago, a lazy young fellow (let's call him Timmy) decided that he'd had enough of foraging, fishing and hunting for his own food. This lad decided that he would instead take a nice shiny sea shell he'd found while he was lounging on the beach and exchange it with the guys next door for a share of the fruit of their hard labour. By doing so, though he didn't know it yet, Timmy had opened Pandora's Box.

For this innocent act set the ball rolling on the system we still use today of assigning some arbitrary value, or cost, to items and exchanging otherwise meaningless pieces of paper to effect a trade. One could extrapolate slightly and become convinced that his actions are directly responsible for the current economic crisis, pollution, global warming, swine flu and Britney Spears!

And yet I feel a special kinship with this ancestor of mine. He was simply trying to do as little as possible to get what he wanted. That is something I can fully appreciate. But I seem to have inherited not only Timmy's disposition, but also his knack for unintended consequences - usually involving some inconvenience to those around me.

A simple 15 minute drive from A to B might get me lost while trying a shortcut and take 45 minutes, while a friend who desperately needs to use the loo sits next to me; a friend doing me a favour by taking me to get my visa renewed spends 2 hours waiting for me to get to the front of the queue, only to then be told that it was the wrong queue; I spend all night preparing to give a seminar to my supervisor's class and then oversleep, making him talk for 45 minutes about something he really knows very little about. And these aren't isolated incidents. I think that if I were to ever meet Mr. Murphy - he of the eponymous Murphy's Law - he would marvel at the realisation of his philosophy in one individual.

So it is that I have come to be 'The Cost' or Lacost. And where my predecessor dealt in shells and copper, I deal in wasted time, pent up frustration and lost opportunities. And now it's time to take this show on the web!

- Lacost