Cheap Pegs

So I live in a house and have a hills hoist aka a clothes line in my back yard. I’m proud to say that it was an aussie invention but Im not proud of how I have been treating the poor thing. Let me explain…

I live with two other people and our hills hoist (which I will call Mr.H) gets a work out because we are all females and wash lots of clothes. As a result, there needs to be lots of pegs to keep all those clothes on the line.

One day when I was doing the washing I noticed that I hadnt even gotten through half of my washing and there wasnt enough pegs to fix the clothes to the line. On previous attempts there had been enough but for some reason this time round, there wasnt enough pegs.

A month went by and I realised that those extra pegs werent surfacing anywhere so I decided when I was next out at the shops, I would buy some for the house hold. So thats what I did. But to my amazement, I didnt realise how many varieties of pegs there were to choose from. There were wooden pegs, plastic pegs, short pegs, pegs with extra large springs, colourful pegs, bland pegs…the list goes on.

Being the one focused person I can sometimes be, my mission was simple: Get lots of pegs so we wont run out for a long while because everyone knows that pegs just dont disappear. So thats what I did. I bought a huge bag of pegs at a reasonable but cheaper price, paid for them and brought them home.

The house hold was happy because we didnt have to strategically think about how large our washing loads could be and there was ample supply of it all.

But as per usual, there is a BUT in this story and its self inflicted lol.

Over the past month, I have been doing lots of washing. And there is still lots of pegs from the time I bought months ago. However, most of the pegs are now unusable because they snap when you go to grip them for use. Well, surely thats a manufacturing issue not my problem. It could be. But what I had failed to do was think about the durability and strength of the pegs instead of their function.

Sounds deep for a story about plastic pegs for goodness sake I hear you saying. Well yeah, but Im a simple girl and learn from simple things.

Often we go into life with our own agenda thinking ‘ this is my mission. This is going to happen. I need get/do this, this and this to make it happen’. But sometimes we forget about the tools it takes to support that mission and how we need to look after those tools. E.g. the pegs I bought served a function and served it well. They met a need and satisfied a mission of getting clothes dry.

But when buying the pegs, I never thought that the hot sun would dry out out the plastic and decrease the durability of the pegs ( I mean who thinks of that) and that maybe buying less of the pegs and stronger pegs would have been a better option.Tick.

There are always going to be things you learn as a result of doing it first and making a mistake. But if you take time to make a decision rather than rushing that decision to fill a need, it usually works better in the long run.

Like not taking a job because the pay packet is more than sufficient to pay a debt, or booking a random flight because its cheap and not checking how much annual leave you will have by the time you fly. Common sense I know, but we all do it.

Cheap pegs are exactly that. Cheap. 

Cheap decisions reap cheap results.They bring change with an expiry date.

Next time you buy pegs, go designer so to say. And when you go to make a decision, take a moment, just sit right there and tell me how you going to become the Price of Bel-Air…no wrong song.

Just take a moment before rushing to the counter

Thats all 🙂

Luv as always

An xx