For the bulk of my life, certainly since the tongue started to talk, I have been well off the pace when it comes to new things.
Cellphones, Led Zeppelin and facial hair are but three I have found myself catching up on many years after everybody else.
So when my 18-year-old nephew Jack informed me about one-day internet sales last week, in a voice he would use to say grass is green, Uncle Roy, I just sighed and thought here we go again.
And off I went to the link.
Jack divined that I wouldn't recognise a worthwhile new thing if it bit me on the nose when he was about 6, and has been politely condescending to me ever since.
He said this was a great site, deleted, excess and outlet stock fired out super-cheap for just 24 hours.
Once they were sold they were gone, you had to be quick.
I will have a look, I said, trying to sound as condescending to him as he had sounded to me.
I raced to the site.
There were three items on sale daily, plus a wine cellar.
I knew instantly this would be a fatal attraction.
Like most Kiwis, I buy the bargain not the goods, so if the item on sale is $299.99 reduced to $29.99, I will buy that thing regardless of what it is, I will not read the large print.
In the first week, I bought three items.
The Mega Bloks ProBuilder 120-piece racing car for ages 6 and up, $9.99 down from $39.99, will be ideal at Christmas when the 4-year-old grandson, as smart as 6-plus, comes out from Chicago and throws a tantrum none of the adults can quell.
I will take the little bleeder into another room, reveal the 120-piece racing car, and return with tantrum quelled.
I will tell them one merely has to speak to a child as if he were an adult.
The Vans Little Italy watch was a mistake, I make no apology for that.
I won't reveal the price because my wife will read this, but the saving was colossal.
The picture showed it had a yellow strap, but unaccountably the specifications said the strap was black, and unaccountably I believed the specifications.
It's a skate boarder's watch, said my son incredulously, almost as if this was a bad thing for a 61-year-old man.
My wife laughed so loudly when she saw it she choked on her food.
The third thing was even worse, a wireless cycle speedometer, which I somehow thought I could put on the broken Pro Form exercycle, whose speedo had broken.
I won't reveal the price, because my wife will read this, but I had to rub my eyes to believe the amount I was saving.
It probably works well, but only on exercycles with wheels, and wheels with spokes.
This was plain in the ad, but I thought I knew better.
My son at least acknowledged I had found an internet site that was worthy of a brief look.
He popped in there and bought some Mossimo jeans and Diesel cologne.
But just to show he was much more on the pace than me, he gave me a link that revealed there are other one-day sales: 49 in fact.
And that was by last Thursday.
There will be 53 now.
I scanned them all immediately and found a number of potential Father's Day gifts I hoped he had seen as well.
Like the two-for-one book deal at $7.95, a saving of $52, one of which was the Mad Butcher's autobiography What A Ride.
The Mad Butcher is as mad as a button of course, but I bet this is a spiffing read.
The other book was Ready For Anything by lawyer Catriona MacLennan, advice for what to do when you are growing old.
I already know that, you prowl the internet for bargains.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
