I went to see Alice Cooper at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre the other night. I’m not a huge rock music fan, but I loved Alice Cooper when I was a teenager, especially the song Poison. I had the single on tape and listened to it over and over again on my little black Sanyo tape player; my prized possession back in the day. I don’t miss tapes, but that doesn’t change the fact that I think iTunes sucks balls.

Anyway, because I’m a tightarse I drove down to Brisbane and back home again straight after the gig. It’s a four hour trip each way. It’s just such a giant pain organising accomodation and it’s so freakin’ expensive for what it is. I couldn’t face the idea of having to weave my way out of Brisbane the next day, so driving home was the best option. Being a tightarse has consequences of course and the most obvious one in this situation is being tired the next day. There are other consequences too, but more about that in a minute.

This post refers to the Frankenstein that is my insatiable apeitite for learning (the title of this post is an Alice Cooper song about sexual appetite), leading me to embark on a year-long quest for learning how to do things I’d never done before. One of them is tap dancing.

I’ve had four tap dancing lessons and I still haven’t learned how to do anything apart from marching forwards and marching backwards (which everyone can already do without lessons). The teacher and the other ladies in the class spend most of the lessons talking about work (they are all teachers) and about their kids. The remainder of the lessons are spent focused on the ladies who can already dance, which I get because there’s five of them and I’m the only beginner, but that doesn’t change the fact that I paid $110 for the “term” We spend about a total of five – six minutes actually dancing in an hour long lesson, which doesn’t normally start until ten minutes past when it’s meant to. It always finishes exactly when it’s meant to, though.  At the lesson yesterday I really started to get pissed off.

I originally thought I might be too stupid to dance because I could never get anything right and couldn’t follow any of the complicated instructions the instructor gave me, but it turns out the reason for that is because she’s not actually teaching me anything, which I wouldn’t have realised had I not met Adam last week. Adam was there for a meeting after the dance class and I got talking to him as I was leaving. He told me about clogging lessons, which I’d never heard of, so I looked it up online, contacted the teacher and arranged to go along to a lesson last Saturday.

I was a bit worried it would be the same as the tap dancing class, but it was the polar opposite; everyone was friendly, the teacher explained every single thing she did, told us all what each move was called, repeated each step and built up to a simple routine that all of us could do easily by the end of the lesson, which all cost a total of $8 for an entire hour of dancing – not talking. The lesson started on time and finished on time, with another group commencing immediatley after the group I was in finished. There were about fifteen people in my group and more than twenty-five in the second group. One lady even had a baby strapped to her front as she danced!

During the week I spent a fair bit of time on YouTube looking at beginner’s tap dancing routines. They were all easy to follow, the instructors announced what the steps were called, how to count beats to the music and they all went over the importance of the ankle and knee positions, which is something I’d never heard of in the tap dancing classes.

Being a tight arse makes me want to go back to the tap dancing classes to get my value for money, but it doesn’t take away the fact that I’m pissed off about not learning anything in the classes. What I’m actually pissed off about, if I’m really honest, is that I duped myself out of the money I’ve paid up front (I’m sure it won’t be refunded if I quit and I accept that), so I’m actually pissed off at myself, not the teacher. I can see the tap dancing classes aren’t working for me, so I’m losing more than the money I’ve paid up front by trying to get what I’ve paid for by continuing to go to the classes; I’m losing my time, which is worse than losing money because it’s a piece of my life that I will never get back and there’s no way to put a price on that. Even though I know this, it’s really hard to let that money go. I feel like I’ve been ripped off, but the only person who has ripped me off is myself.

Still, if I never went to the tap dancing classes I would never have met Adam and found out about the clogging. I would never have met Dot at the clogging class, who told me about square dancing classes (I loved square dancing when I was a kid) once a week for $5. I would never have bought my tap dancing shoes, which I can use for clogging and I would never have discovered all the cool tap routines on the internet. I also would have never had the opportunity to draw the stupid pictures that I’ve put in this post. That in itself would have been a great loss to humanity!

So, I’m pulling the pin on the tap dancing classes. It’s hard to decide that and I want to run the story that tells me it might get better next week. But, like the cool guy I’m married to said, “if you haven’t learnt anything in four weeks of lessons, do you really think you’re going to learn anything in the remaining six?”

Learning isn’t always addition, it can be subtraction too

Don’t let the sunk cost fallacy hold you back