Roommates and Opportunity Costs

So the person I share an apartment with sometimes drives me up the wall. Occasionally he'll surprise me--like how every other night he washes the dishes, or how he irons and puts the chord back, or how he doesn't chiefly smell all the time, and how he kills bugs that I don't want to kill. But then there will be those little things that just splinter under my fingernails.

Tonight, bless his heart, he broke my coffee mug. You don't know me, but I live and breathe coffee. I also wake up as late as possible every morning. So, I bought this great Starbucks coffee mug a week ago and I've been taking coffee in it to school every morning and enjoying it during my first hour of classes. It's been divine. We've really struck up a fast relationship and I'm pretty fond of my mug. WAS pretty fond of my mug. It was on the counter because it was my night to wash dishes and I was washing the other dishes first. Jon comes in and reaches for something else and knocks it to the ground. It breaks. I don't care - it happens.

But then he goes, "Oh well, it was cheap anyway."

Suddenly all my attachments to the cup come rushing up like a fountain and I want to make sure he knows how much I loved that mug!

He asks, "How much did it cost?"

I say, "$7" and he shrugs and says to put it on our list of shared expenses.

Would this grate anyone else besides me? Probably not. I did let him know that annoyed me. But what I REALLY wanted to say was that it didn't just cost $7. Verbally I was just telling him that was annoying. But mentally I was figuring up what that mug REALLY cost me.

Costs:
$2 for driving over to Starbucks (which cost gas AND opportunity cost because I could have been doing/buying other things).
I'm told I'm worth $10.50 an hour these days, so those 20 minutes I spent laboring over which mug to buy COULD have been spent earning $3.50
Decreasing marginal utility was acheived every time I sipped out of my mug, but since our time together was cut short, I had not yet reached full maximum utility. Can I put a price on utility? I think the loss of that utility would result in punitive damages in a court of law - let's give it $50.
Also, I bought that mug half-off and was so proud of my find! Who says I can find the same sale again? We can safely add $7 to the cost of the mug, knowing I will probably have to pay full-price to replace it.
Since I don't have my coffee mug for school tomorrow, I will have to buy coffee at school, which means I am paying $2.50 that I would otherwise not have spent.

So, really that mug cost me $72. So he THINKS he can just call it 'cheap' and write $7 on the expense list and then have the nerve to tell me 'Well, why don't you just wake up earlier every morning and drink your coffee before you go to school?' So you're telling me that because YOU broke my mug, I should wake up earlier???? My sleeping late is INTENSELY valuable to me. You could not pay me $10 to wake up earlier. So if we're still counting.....just kidding.

I realize I'm over dramatizing. I'm the first to forgive and the last to hold a grudge. But for just a second, since he was so quick to devalue what was important to me, I mentally let myself go to the crazy place.

If it helps clear up why he gets under my fingernails, he's my brother. So you could say there's a history there.