Beating the System

If you know me, you know that I'm cheap. Maybe frugal on my best, splurgiest days. My desire to avoid wasting money, however, often works with my belief that the system is designed to cheat me and my is-it-worth-it system of calculating value to make my life very difficult. For example, parking. Having grown up in a town with more than enough free parking, and having been scandalized when our only parking garage started charging (gasp!) something like $1 per hour, I have a very hard time forking over money for parking now (this is just one of the many reasons I rarely go to the other, pricier side of the river). This is especially difficult on campus, where there is no free parking within a mile of anywhere I ever need to be. When I need to go to the library, or the dentist, or my office, I calculate how many other, better things I could buy with the money I would have to pay to park close to where I'm going (the aforementioned is-it-worth-it system): the spots closest to the dentist, for example cost something like $5 per hour, which is lunch, or half a bottle of cheap wine, or a couple of used books. The cheaper lots cost $3 per hour, which is a gallon of milk. Then there are meters, which almost never works for me, because I have to have quarters, and because one quarter only buys me 12 minutes, which just seems ridiculous. So I park miles from anywhere and hike all over campus, which is how I almost missed my dentist appointment and nearly died of heatstroke yesterday. I've also been known to visit more than one grocery store on the same shopping trip just because I know milk is cheaper at one, but tortillas are cheaper at the other. I have to walk all the way through the farmers market before I can buy anything, to be sure I'm not paying too much for sub-par green onions. Actually, you can apply this routine to almost everything I do, from buying textbooks to shoes to plane tickets. Since it hardly ever works out in my favor (e.g. when I spend so long comparison shopping plane tickets that the fare goes up $200), and I realize that the effort involved in beating the system is usually not worth the money I could save, I've resolved to relax (just a little) about this.
The first test: today, I have to go to campus for an eye appointment. I've been having a lot of trouble with my contacts lately, and they've tried all kinds of different brands and solutions and stuff. If these contacts work, I was planning to take the prescription off the sample cases and order them online for less money than the clinic would charge me. But with my luck recently, I'd probably have my identity stolen from the contact lens website and wind up having to declare bankruptcy just because I didn't want to spend that extra $50. So today, I'm going to just grit my teeth and tell the clinic to order my contacts, and use that extra hour I would have spent trying to order them online doing something more fun, like finding prescription sunglasses. I'll probably even pay for parking (but at a meter, I think - don't want to go too overboard).

Update: these contacts are not working, now there's a new solution and eye drops every two hours. If this doesn't work, the doctor I've been seeing has recommended that I basically give up on contacts altogether. Sigh...
Also, I did not pay for parking, but opted to walk a few extra blocks instead. This is especially good, since I'm going to be paying more for my vision now than ever before. I'm working to be less cheap when it's not productive, but hey - I still have a budget.