Follow up: I now save £20,000...every month!

It is common knowledge that I saved £9,970 (£10,000 depending on how you look at it) by buying an, ahem, 'not so original' Rolex watch. Some might argue that it's not a big deal and that by buying an air ticket as opposed to buying the plane itself one can save somewhere in the region of $19,999,000 (assuming the plane is a small second hand exec jet and the ticket is a long haul one. There is no real upper limit on the amount you could save. However, you can sell the jet after the journey and recover some money out of it and the same can be said about the Rolex.

This week, I discovered I've been saving around £20,000, on average, EVERY month, for the past 288 months, that's around £5.76 million. With that kind of money, I should be richer than my wildest dreams... to date. Sadly, I'm not. This is a matter that's worth some deep introspection. And introspect is exactly what I did. Why didn't I save that kind of money? Where did I go wrong?

Some really deep analysis later, I realised something profound. In order to save money, you should have not spent it on something and in turn, in order to have the choice of not spending money on something, you should have had the money in the first place - present or future, which, sadly, I do not. Having made peace with myself on my shortcoming, I decided to spin a tabloid isstyle tale to the world (kuppura vizhundalum, meesaila mannu ottalai and all that) on how I am saving the money.

On a related note, have you heard of the Russian billionaire* who gets into a limousine in Moscow, gets stuck in traffic going to the airport, jumps into a jet and flies 6-7 hours to London Heathrow airport, gets onto another limousine, gets stuck in traffic coming into central London for a couple of hours and 2 hours later does the same thing all over again to return to Moscow?

For just two blessed hours, this monumental idiot spends around a day in travel! What does he do in those two hours - he gets a haircut. That's right, he gets his mop cropped and to do that, he comes to London all the way from Russia. Makes you wonder:

• Is there a serious dearth of barbers in Russia? Have all of them gone digging oil wells to make said moron richer still?
• Does this guy have anything at all to do in life other than getting his hair cut?
• Is this barber better than Veluchamy who used to trim my mop in school?
• Don't even get me started on the 2 hour long hair cut. If there was a way to burn my hair in a controlled manner that would rid me of extra hair in 10 seconds, I'd willingly burn it, without a second thought. I can't sit on a barber's chair for more than 15 minutes (of which I nap for 10).

The haircut itself doesn't seem too over the top to begin with (pun intended!). The reporter of one of the newspapers that came out with this story took it and in his before and after photographs, I can't really make out any difference, it looks like the hair wasn't cut at all, and it had additionally been tumble dried for good measure.

For the money you pay, according to the barber himself, you get his services for the whole day. I immediately have problems with that:

• not to be offensive, if I wanted to hang out with barbers, I can do it for free with any of the barbers I've had so far right from Veluchamy to Imran, thank you.
  
• if a Russian oligarch wants to hang out with his barber rather than his I'm-a-bigger-snob-than-you golfing partner, there is a slight problem with society at that level.
• Not only is the guy (the barber) being lazy by only servicing one client the whole day, he's actually minting money out of this!
  

Apparently, one of the highlights of the 'experience' is that you get to eat the meal of your choice WHILE your hair is being cut. Who does that? Tell that to my parents! They don't let me eat anything AFTER my hair is cut before I shower, let alone while! Imagine this conversation:
Barber: "what would like to eat, saar?"
Me: "I'll have a caviar salad, thank you"
Barber: "Will that be with or without dressing, saar?"
Me: "Without, please"
Barber: "Wokay saar, but you do realise that we cannot avoid garnishing it with hair?"
Me: trying not to be sick.

* while I could find the link to the £20,000 haircut story online, I couldn't find the link to the particular story I've referred to here. Please bear with that

P.S.: We very often tend to dismiss the work done by hairstylists as petty and demeaning, it is not. Having said that, a barber by any other name is just a barber, just like a bean counter by any other name is just as boring. What offends me is the obscene money that is spent on the act of keeping said mop clean.

P.P.S: I admire this bloke for he is making more money doing over the top work than any of ever will! Who knows, for one day, he just might engage my employer to audit his company's books with me being the audit manager, so might as well suck up to him :)!