The best purchase I made--- purely based on bang for buck, not purchases of sentiment or significance--- came a few summers ago, when at the Pensacola Interstate Fair Outlet fair I exchanged a twenty and a ten dollar bill for a flatbed scanner. With one single USB port connection I could transform flimsy strips of photo paper into pixelated graphic displays on my computer and the internet. If not for the scanner, that photo of Mike sucking on my walking stick would be confined to my photo album, shackled from the rest of the internet world.

Today I received a surprise e-mail from a girl I met in South Africa, asking me to send her the picture of us during our final night of that indescribable trip. I'm able to grant such requests after a click on the scanner and a trip to outlook express... but this be no longer so. A retrieval of the scanner from my closet, an openning of the front latch, a crooked laser sliding dealy (whatever actually goes through the motion of scanning the picture), a broken piece of black plastic swimming around the base, a scanner which can no longer serve its purpose. How this happened? I do not know. What I do know is this: my best purchase sits lifeless, without a purpose, reaping no more rewards.