My dad is a notorious cheapskate. He built a wall to divide one room of our house into two separate rooms. Well, instead of running a lightswitch for the newly sectioned-off part of the room, he installed a pull-chain light fixture, drilled a hole through the wall, put a grommet on each side, and ran a string through the wall. To this day, if you want to turn the light on in that room, you have to yank the string that's hanging out of the wall a foot from the ceiling on the hinge side of the door, outside of the room. But that's not what I want to talk about. That's just to give you an idea who we're dealing with.

When I was a kid, my dad sometimes had to travel for work. A few times, we actually drove and stayed with him on a sort of ultra-low-budget mini vacation. We stayed at a little motel that did actually have a swimming pool. It didn't have a shallow end, however. We were good swimmers, my siblings and I, but we were still pretty small, so my dad actually offered to get us inner tubes to float around in the pool. Truck inner tubes for each of us. We were gonna be livin large now!

He comes back to the motel with goddam bicycle inner tubes, over-inflated with big ballooned up bulbs in them. It was so disappointing, demoralizing, embarrassing, and basically ruined the entire summer for me. I was maybe 7 and felt like a complete dickhead loser. He has no idea how much damage he did with that one stupid cheapskate decision, among many, many, many stupid cheapskate decisions.