Opportunity Cost...

Opportunity Cost…

I’d never heard that catchy little phrase until I’d eagerly attended my very first session of my first of what turned out to be several economics courses. I was surprised to also learn that that particular area of study wasn’t nearly as unintelligible or intimidating as I’d worried it might prove to be… knowing nothing to speak of about it beforehand…

Yes indeed, ignorance does lead us all into premature but unnecessary palpitations more often than not! No small part of my eagerness to dip my toe into those murky waters of academic inquiry was due to my wanting to know right away if I’d be needing to drop that class at the very beginning… I’d been down that road before…

When I’d launched my collegiate career, I’d figured engineering would be a good and practicable area of pursuit, considering future employment opportunities and the fact I’d been able to handle in secondary school math, science, physics, and other allied topics associated with such a choice. Let me quickly add that I had not been a particularly diligent student back then, having had other things also on my youthful mind.

Well let me tell you, there was so much more to that rigorous curriculum than simply showing up for the required classes, sitting through sessions, taking copious notes, regurgitating information on some test form, and doing all the homework! Advanced math proved to be entirely too demanding for this ungifted freshman student, who had other ‘priorities’ still competing for his time! OK, maybe a ‘major’ change…

I then considered accounting; however… Holy cow, that stuff seemed way more structured, technical, and precise than this young person could get excited about, especially since he’d already learned that he preferred more ‘reasoning’ types of subjects than those heavily bound up in rote learning, repetition, and recurring, rigid, routine ‘rules’ stuff! I only much later learned that there actually are far more interesting aspects to that field than I’d been able to glean from the two basic courses in that discipline I’d dared to dabble with. Well shoot… now what?

OK, maybe I could just bite the bullet and give that dull sounding mysterious economics stuff a shot… The worst that could happen was I’d have to move on to something else… All the while spending money, dropping classes, and… generally spinning my wheels!

Whoa! That stuff actually made sense to me! Heck, I’d even liked it to a certain degree! I found it to be, for me any way, more of a study in human choices, and of the relationships between people, things, logic, self-interest, and likely actions, of human tendencies and their very nature, after a fashion… So, what does any of this have to do with riding, you might reasonably ask…?

Nothing actually, but it does give some insight into how I’ve come to think about such things as well as to how those lines of thought appear throughout nearly every aspect of my own life. Opportunity costs are the ‘total real price we pay’ when we choose to do anything; not simply the amount printed on some tag or rung up on a cash register.

If we decide to travel alone, for example, part of the opportunity cost is having to forego the company of another or others… and vice versa. Whatever we choose regarding anything comes with the reality that we’re giving something else up, something else we might have purchased instead with those same scarce funds… anything else we might have done with the time. It can be applied to any choice, really. All choices have an ‘opportunity cost’ associated with them.

At the expense (opportunity cost) of riding around on another solo coddiewomple, I’d chosen instead to venture off with our newbie Valk rider, Greg Moreland. I missed out on all the things I might have otherwise done, but my time had been ‘invested’ in what was hoped to be a wise and worthwhile undertaking that would produce a memorable dividend in terms of adventure and discovery. That investment has turned out to be producing considerably better returns than what’s been happening to my monetary investments on Wall Street lately… “Let’s go, Brandon!” A little about our newbie…

Greg knows how to ride, and he already has essentially adequate skills. He’s been riding motorized scooters since he was a teenager… he’s now well beyond adolescence, even middle age… His experience, however, has been largely rather limited. His long rides, for instance, were direct solo runs from point A to point B for family visits or doctors’ appointments, etc., with almost none purely for pleasure. He’d never been on what I or many of you might consider a true ‘road trip’. We jointly determined to change that…

Following that weekend BBQ thingy we did with RNFWP and Stanley Steamer, Greg and I set out for Montgomery, AL. Of course, I had yet another doctor appointment, but it would also serve as a meet place for Big Wolf to join Greg and his guide for a little excursion afterward. All seemed good, and the meet-up did happen as planned. Then Jerry invited us to follow him to Rickman, TN, so he could plant some blue-berry plants he’d just picked-up before they wilted and perished… we did…

On that jaunt up to the Volunteer State, Greg became acquainted with one of the several unpleasant things that can crop-up on any otherwise great road trip… The dreaded road construction activity and associated traffic pile-up a mile or two, or several miles sometimes as was the case twice that day. When those happen on days already expected to be long… well, it does weigh upon a person… That was not the only item running up the opportunity cost tab of making that ride in one day either…

From the outset we were delayed by a stop at the McDonald’s restaurant on Zelda Rd. in Montgomery, so we could join ‘Cuz’ for breakfast… That was my doing, as Charles is an old and dear friend of mine, and I really wanted to spend a few minutes with him on this brief drop-by that city of so many contrasts. Jerry had previously met Cuz, but Greg received his first introduction. We eventually did get underway, but… There were a few other ‘cost overruns’ that contributed to this becoming a very long and tiring day in the saddle.

I mentioned that Greg had at the time no true road trip experience… He also had little to no group riding for any distance experience either. I’m sure he never realized the length of time we spent at each stop was really adding to the overall time ‘on the road’ the way it was! He also had no idea at all how long this ride would be under ‘good’ circumstances, which didn’t always occur. He just bided his sweet time each time we stopped, assuming we’d say something if there was a need… Neither Jerry nor I did… my bad! We did arrive just before dark, though, but we all were dog-tired and long past the point where we’d wanted this enterprise to end!

Jerry also incurred some opportunity costs, as well. He was the only member of our party who happened to be matrimonially impaired. His absence, predictably, had created a backlog of ‘honey-dos’, so he was unable to accompany us any further after all. Alas, I recall those days of my own impairment, but frankly, I do not miss them one bit! Greg has never been similarly tethered by a ring in his nose, so for him, all of this is just an unpleasant conceptual conundrum…

The bottom line was, our ‘group’ had been reduced to only two again, as we headed off to dodge rain until the Slade, Kentucky, extravaganza nearly two weeks away… I couldn’t possibly calculate what any future opportunity costs might accrue to us on this next phase of our ride, but I could and absolutely do guarantee there will be some… I’ll get back to you on this…

DDT