Consider this: you have a nine or ten year old, originally fairly cheap vacuum cleaner, which has a busted floor head, a broken handle piece and a dud cable retract. Apart from those problems, it sucks, a lot :-)

Aldi/Hofer has a new vacuum on sale for $39. What do you do?

Well, what I would do (and did), is spend an hour on disassembling the fellow, repairing the cable retract mechanism and reassembling it (twice, as all got stuck somehow); then I would spend another 20min with epoxy resin and glass fibre reinforcement to fix the handle, and finally I'd spend $20 on an almost new Nilfisk turbine brush head.

Why? Because I dislike throwing something away before it's really used up. If it was utterly beyond repair, sure, out it goes. But this one? Nope, that goes against my nature: Resuscitators R Us.

I needed the time working on layer zero anyway (after a recent spate of debian work on duplicity and other stuff that I don't benefit much from but somehow feel/felt obliged to do nevertheless), the epoxy was a left over, ebay is fun occasionally and it's not as if I have much of a life that might get in the way of "wasting" an evening. sigh

But then the vac sucks again, and that is gratifying in itself.