FortySouth

About two years ago I had a crisis of thought. As some most at the pinnacle of their undergraduate electrical engineering education, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t considering a change in major to anything else, not just because I was too far in already, but I actually did enjoy most of what I was learning.

I asked myself this often because I found that I seemed to quickly forget material learnt from previous semesters. Once the semester was done, I let out a sigh of relief and promptly sold some of my books.

I sold fewer, though, as I progressed through my program for a couple of reasons. The first, and more compelling reason, was that the books became invaluable references in subsequent classes. The other was that the geniuses at the school bookstore would usually buy them back for the almost criminal rate of 50% of my purchase price! Now, just so you understand, I bought all my books out of pocket which stung, and each hardly cost under $100 so offering $49.99 was tantamount to a very classy No Deal. What sort of investment will, with predictable consistency and without fault, depreciate to half its value in a 16-week time span? The same book is then unassumingly decked on the shelf the following semester retailing at, predictably, 7/8ths of the price of a new book. Clearly, I’m in the wrong business. Then I found the Amazon seller account, somewhat more reliable than eBay, where on a good day I could almost recoup my investment.

But I digress. Continue reading