Buy Cheap, Get Cheap

While in Australia, I came across one of those lovely little Asian stalls selling things so cheaply you wonder if they're making anything on it at all! They had batteries for sale - a dollar for 20! Having just discovered my digital camera eats batteries for lunch every day, I thought that would be handy to have around.

Unfortunately, it seems that the batteries were not only cheap, but rather lacking in an essential ingredient - power... Put them in the camera, and the intelligent beast asks for REAL food, not even willing to bend its snooty nose to acknowledge the presence of something calling itself a battery.

All 20 batteries simply don't work in the digital camera.

So we brought them home with a view to trying them on other, less-snooty apparatus, like the remotes, and the torches we keep handy by the phone. They sorta worked in the remotes, but the torches produced less than a candle's worth of light - and soon none at all.

Our cheap stuff has now been relegated to office clocks and other devices that don't care what they eat.

And I've invested in rechargeables, with a charger.