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Calculator Woes

By Surya ⋅ June 17, 2005 ⋅ Email this Post Email this Post ⋅ Print this post Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Just one of those days when the world definitely doesn’t seem to be on my side. After surviving with a scientific calculator (legacy of my engineering degree), I decided it is time I graduated to a professional financial calculator. After I decided on a particular Texas model,I discoverd its not available in Duesseldorf (or at least I dont know the right places to get it).

Amazon.de sells it at a price which is more than double that of the US counterpart. And not just that, I have a sneaky feeling that the manual will be in German. Who knows, even the keys may have German equivalents. So, I ain’t gonna buy it online, without making sure I can read it.

After bracing myself to pay the shipping charges from US and the unreasonable German taxes on goods shipped from US (plus, I recently found out that UPS charges you another 11.6 Euros as administrative fee, just for paying the tax on your behalf!), I decided to buy my calculator from the US Amazon. Guess what! They don’t ship calculators outside of US! @#$*%#%!

I am just flabbergasted at how difficult it is to buy a simple thing as a calculator! Well, the bright side is - I am now more motivated to expedite my German lessons, at least to be confident enough to read German instructions on a calculator.

Discussion

4 comments for “Calculator Woes”

  1. me still using the scientific calculator…helped me a lot in todays statistics paper :-)

    Posted by Anish | June 18, 2005, 3:25 pm

  2. hope ur exam went well =)

    Posted by Surya | June 18, 2005, 10:08 pm

  3. I don’t think that they manufacture a Germany specific model - most such products will come with a multi-lingual manual - french, german, italian, korean, japanese, spanish and all in one book.

    Did you check ebay.de? Its a good source. By the way for buying books - use http://www.addall.com for comparing prices - even for delivery to Germany.

    Do you or Srijit know of any Belgian online bookstore - they dont have taxes on books - so it must be even cheaper…

    Posted by Pramod | June 20, 2005, 11:03 pm

  4. Ya, sadly they do manufacture German specific models - most the stuff I have bought here, including a normal calculator I bought here after this post, dont have English manuals.

    Thanks for the addall link and Belgian tip. Must admit I have been using addall since I saw it on ur booktag post =)

    Posted by Surya | June 21, 2005, 6:48 am

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