Spending Other People's Money
Nov. 14th, 2005 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marcusmarcusrcor, "thoughts I had after finding out that oversized color posters are $*&! expensive"
As a chemist (both undergrad and masters), older grad students and profs slowly convinced me that you _always_ spend the extra money to buy a reagent even if you think you can make it. This is a combination of "Your time is valuable" and "making stuff on an industrial scale usually means that they can get it more pure than you usually will on the benchtop" (with one or two exceptions where we knew we would have to repurify the chemical).
As a PhD student, my administrator has been working on me to spend more money when I go on trips. Taking taxis rather than public transit*, getting reimbursed for _everything_, etc. etc. Still, I prefer a per diem, because then I feel like I'm spending my money, not other people's money. As an economist, per diems seem more rational, too (well, people other than me might choose to go to more expensive restaurants just because their work is paying for it).
Anyway, I spent much of this morning walking around trying to save MIT money because I didn't want to spend $100 on a poster. Usually I just slap 9 pieces of paper on 9 pieces of posterboard, but since I'm doing a poster for MIT bigwigs, I thought it should look nicer than that. But see above: oversized color posters are expensive! But even after getting the cost down to $50 by making it smaller, using CopyTech rather than Kinko's, and doing the foam core mounting myself, I still feel bad about spending other people's money.
Do other people feel this way? I feel like much of the world _prefers_ spending other people's money...
*Note that I often take public transit anyway because I prefer getting a feel for the city I'm in. Certainly, when I go on vacation for myself I do that.
As a chemist (both undergrad and masters), older grad students and profs slowly convinced me that you _always_ spend the extra money to buy a reagent even if you think you can make it. This is a combination of "Your time is valuable" and "making stuff on an industrial scale usually means that they can get it more pure than you usually will on the benchtop" (with one or two exceptions where we knew we would have to repurify the chemical).
As a PhD student, my administrator has been working on me to spend more money when I go on trips. Taking taxis rather than public transit*, getting reimbursed for _everything_, etc. etc. Still, I prefer a per diem, because then I feel like I'm spending my money, not other people's money. As an economist, per diems seem more rational, too (well, people other than me might choose to go to more expensive restaurants just because their work is paying for it).
Anyway, I spent much of this morning walking around trying to save MIT money because I didn't want to spend $100 on a poster. Usually I just slap 9 pieces of paper on 9 pieces of posterboard, but since I'm doing a poster for MIT bigwigs, I thought it should look nicer than that. But see above: oversized color posters are expensive! But even after getting the cost down to $50 by making it smaller, using CopyTech rather than Kinko's, and doing the foam core mounting myself, I still feel bad about spending other people's money.
Do other people feel this way? I feel like much of the world _prefers_ spending other people's money...
*Note that I often take public transit anyway because I prefer getting a feel for the city I'm in. Certainly, when I go on vacation for myself I do that.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-14 09:22 am (UTC)If I had done that it would have had as much to do with value as expense. I'd be willing to spend $100 of my work's money on something worth $100. But if it doesn't seem worth $100 to me then I won't want to spend the money, mine or someone else's.
I'll also point out that the unwillingness to spend other people's money is a lot like spending time on other people's project instead of your thesis. Other people's resources are valuable, yours are fungible.
To actually answer your question (Do other people feel this way?)
I'm getting better at having a sane exchange rate between time, effort, and money. When I'm volunteering for something I know that all three resources are limited. I've already figured out how much of my time I can use on that project. So I spend more money if it will free up that percentage of my effort for other things.
In some ways this means that I'm freer with other people's money than with my own. My projects rarely have a strict deadline, so I can usually just take longer doing them. But it's also the case that I'm buying stuff for me in a more established way, so the increase in effort to save the money is minimal.
And clearly you should convince your department that you should enter a poster-printer-sharing plan with some other department. Most reasonable than buying your own, but less expensive than commercial printing.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-14 09:31 am (UTC)And yeah, I do need to work on figuring out my personal time/effort/money exchange rate. That would be valuable.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-14 10:45 am (UTC)