-Especially if we're old and ailing, it's very likely that our loved ones will be so delighted that we've decided to eliminate tobacco cigarettes that they'll frequently make us presents of everything from juice to extension cords for the sitting room where the settee is 12 feet from the wall plug.
This is an immense blessing - and for some of us, a much-needed chance to learn humility.
Some of us, however, are such hard-headed and prideful old coots and cootesses that though we may learn to accept those gifts with grace and in the spirit of love with which they are given, that's as a long, long way from asking outright for something we need.
Real talk, you can go ahead and put that "asking outright" thing on the list of things that are so not going to happen.
We're not likely to depend on our loved ones to monitor when we're getting low on this or that, either.
Inasmuch as we can, providing for ourselves is just another little morsel of independence, and as the years pass, we tend to cherish those morsels very much.
Keeping yourself well-stocked with e-cigarette supplies on a tight budget can be done, but it takes work - and that o-word again. So let's get to it!
1) Get a dedicated email address, meaning one that you'll use for your e-cigarette supply purchases and nothing else, and create a folder for each company from which you purchase anything. At all. Ever.
Some stores oblige you to "create an account" when you buy something. Whether they do or not, you'll find it much more convenient to do so, and in the long run, well worth the upfront outlay of annoyance.
If you don't, 2 or 3 months down the road, as you're sitting there with a jeweler's loupe trying to decipher the name of the company printed in 2 point type on a teeny tiny label on a teeny tiny bottle of juice that you got when MysteryCo had that $2 sample sale and this one turned out to be just delicious after it sat around for 2 or 3 months, but now all you can see is what's left of the blurry piece of mini-bandaid upon which you wrote something that looks like "croc puddle," you'll wish you had.
If you have an account, if you can vaguely recall having neon pink bandaids back in April, you'll be able to go to your dedicated email account and look through your April messages and find which company sent you the teeny tiny bottle of "chocolate truffle."
When you're making up a PIF Basket for that loved one far away, but can't for the life of you remember which company it was that had both cheap electric hookah-doodles AND wall rodents, you can just search through your email instead of having to go click through all 7 bazillion companies on the ECF Forum Suppliers list to see which ones even sell KR808d-1 wall rodents.
It'll probably be either Good Prophets, Litecigusa, or vaporsetc but when you're old and heavily sedated, 3 can be a large and confusing number.
That's why we use KR808d-1s - only 2 things to hook up.
2) Make a bookmarks folder, and in it put this link to the "Deals and Steals" thread.
There's also a "seasonal" thread in the forums where the stores can post about their holiday sales.
Bookmark that, then go into the "Forum Suppliers" section, find and bookmark the sub-forum or thread for each store for which you've made an email folder.
There's also something called a Coupon Code Master List where some discounts listed may be smaller, but as hairball says, every penny counts!
Both it and the "Deals and Steals" thread are provided as a gift from our ECF brothers and sisters, who do a phenomenal job of proclaiming just about every sale and discount code that comes down the pike.
The problem is, suppose you want to find a sale on a specific item, say Boge HR cartomizers (the kind that work best with Generation 1 KR808d-1s). You'll have to do a lot of clicking, because there's not really a breakdown of sale items by category, for two very good reasons:
1) The number of categories is already well into the thousands
2) The kind people who perform the noble and philanthropic act of maintaining the "Deals and Steals" thread have lives, and those of us who have enough time on our hands to devote the hours it would require to effect such a breakdown tend, like me, to be old and loopy people who are just as liable to send you clicking off to the World's Softest Socks website or some just-opened eBay store that specializes in jeweled cat collars for only $3.99.
Those happen to be the same reasons there's no comprehensive and up-to-date list of vendors who sell things for KR808d-1s (or any of the others) at all, much less the ones that are having a sale today.
Vapor4Life announces its sales via mailing lists, so get your dedicated email address on it. They have sales about every other day, but hold out for the ones that are 25% off or more.
(If you're outside the USA, a few times a year they have "free shipping" days, and that's the time you'll want to pounce!)
Carefeully planning your V4L purchases to coincide with their sale days is the secret to getting those things you can't get anywhere else for the same price you'd pay for an item that, depending on your individual needs, comes in a poor second.
Aim for checking those bookmarks and your dedicated email every day. That's probably not going to happen, but the more closely you monitor, the less likely you are to miss out on things like big sales and "sampler packs" (Thanks, hairball!) that can help you plump out your spice rack of condiment juices without breaking the bank.
4) Know when to stop.
When you're running really low on those Boge HR cartomizers, if at some point you realized you've already put in more than a full working day of searching vendors and forum threads looking for somebody selling the things at that hefty discount, it's time to ask yourself how likely you are to locate a sale hefty enough to justify continued research instead of just reciting a card number to the nice people over at vaporsetc and letting them know you need some more cartomizers.
3) Unless you have money to spare and have taken up electric cigarettes as your new hobby, don't go buying every new thing that comes down the pike.
Use common sense. As is the case with all consumables, there are ongoing NEEDS, like cartomizers and juice and replacement/backup batteries, of the variety we know works for us, and there are things that we might WANT, but buying them will reduce our ability to pay for the things we NEED.
You can only spend a dollar once. And, yes, that is an outrage and should be changed.
If it's something like Colory Cartomizer Hats, which Hon Lik should have thought of, and you've been waiting for somebody to come to their senses and start making, of course you go get some immediately.
But if it's another one of those nu-Gos that come out about as often as V4L has a sale, treat yourself like you would a 7 year old and consider whether you'd rather have that nuGo, that might or might not be substantially better than what you've got, or the juice and cartomizers that you'll definitely need.
Don't worry. If that nuGo is really all that much better than the lastwee-Go, you'll hear about little else all over the forum.
As much as I love my new long and elegant V4L jeweled pushybuttons, if I hadn't received them as a gift, I doubt I'd have bought one until they'd been out for a while and a whole lot of people (whose other posts indicate that their throat hit preferences are similar to mine) had said they were substantially closer to a hookah-doodle - especially as these need their own special charger.
Now because these ARE substantially better than what I had, these are the ones I'll now take with me on outings to shaman and drugstore. I'll save my old ones - and their chargers - all put up in a safe place so I won't get confused, and gradually transition to the new ones by attrition.
Even though they do perform better, because they can't be used with my other chargers, I won't buy any for my UZAP** kit until one of my old batteries dies or I run into a situation where I need to PIF one to somebody even worse off than I am who prefers a little less throat hit.
Better products are supposed to happen. Market gaps are supposed to be filled.
But it's up to us to consider which new products really are better for US versus which ones are just better for the companies!
And when that new product requires the purchase of another new product, it's up to us to consider even harder.
We don't want to miss out on real improvements, but If it ain't broke, we don't need to fix it - and if even if it is broke, is it more broke than we are?
** Unscheduled Zombie Attack Preparedness
This is an immense blessing - and for some of us, a much-needed chance to learn humility.
Some of us, however, are such hard-headed and prideful old coots and cootesses that though we may learn to accept those gifts with grace and in the spirit of love with which they are given, that's as a long, long way from asking outright for something we need.
Real talk, you can go ahead and put that "asking outright" thing on the list of things that are so not going to happen.
We're not likely to depend on our loved ones to monitor when we're getting low on this or that, either.
Inasmuch as we can, providing for ourselves is just another little morsel of independence, and as the years pass, we tend to cherish those morsels very much.
Keeping yourself well-stocked with e-cigarette supplies on a tight budget can be done, but it takes work - and that o-word again. So let's get to it!
1) Get a dedicated email address, meaning one that you'll use for your e-cigarette supply purchases and nothing else, and create a folder for each company from which you purchase anything. At all. Ever.
Some stores oblige you to "create an account" when you buy something. Whether they do or not, you'll find it much more convenient to do so, and in the long run, well worth the upfront outlay of annoyance.
If you don't, 2 or 3 months down the road, as you're sitting there with a jeweler's loupe trying to decipher the name of the company printed in 2 point type on a teeny tiny label on a teeny tiny bottle of juice that you got when MysteryCo had that $2 sample sale and this one turned out to be just delicious after it sat around for 2 or 3 months, but now all you can see is what's left of the blurry piece of mini-bandaid upon which you wrote something that looks like "croc puddle," you'll wish you had.
If you have an account, if you can vaguely recall having neon pink bandaids back in April, you'll be able to go to your dedicated email account and look through your April messages and find which company sent you the teeny tiny bottle of "chocolate truffle."
When you're making up a PIF Basket for that loved one far away, but can't for the life of you remember which company it was that had both cheap electric hookah-doodles AND wall rodents, you can just search through your email instead of having to go click through all 7 bazillion companies on the ECF Forum Suppliers list to see which ones even sell KR808d-1 wall rodents.
It'll probably be either Good Prophets, Litecigusa, or vaporsetc but when you're old and heavily sedated, 3 can be a large and confusing number.
That's why we use KR808d-1s - only 2 things to hook up.
2) Make a bookmarks folder, and in it put this link to the "Deals and Steals" thread.
There's also a "seasonal" thread in the forums where the stores can post about their holiday sales.
Bookmark that, then go into the "Forum Suppliers" section, find and bookmark the sub-forum or thread for each store for which you've made an email folder.
There's also something called a Coupon Code Master List where some discounts listed may be smaller, but as hairball says, every penny counts!
Both it and the "Deals and Steals" thread are provided as a gift from our ECF brothers and sisters, who do a phenomenal job of proclaiming just about every sale and discount code that comes down the pike.
The problem is, suppose you want to find a sale on a specific item, say Boge HR cartomizers (the kind that work best with Generation 1 KR808d-1s). You'll have to do a lot of clicking, because there's not really a breakdown of sale items by category, for two very good reasons:
1) The number of categories is already well into the thousands
2) The kind people who perform the noble and philanthropic act of maintaining the "Deals and Steals" thread have lives, and those of us who have enough time on our hands to devote the hours it would require to effect such a breakdown tend, like me, to be old and loopy people who are just as liable to send you clicking off to the World's Softest Socks website or some just-opened eBay store that specializes in jeweled cat collars for only $3.99.
Those happen to be the same reasons there's no comprehensive and up-to-date list of vendors who sell things for KR808d-1s (or any of the others) at all, much less the ones that are having a sale today.
Vapor4Life announces its sales via mailing lists, so get your dedicated email address on it. They have sales about every other day, but hold out for the ones that are 25% off or more.
(If you're outside the USA, a few times a year they have "free shipping" days, and that's the time you'll want to pounce!)
Carefeully planning your V4L purchases to coincide with their sale days is the secret to getting those things you can't get anywhere else for the same price you'd pay for an item that, depending on your individual needs, comes in a poor second.
Aim for checking those bookmarks and your dedicated email every day. That's probably not going to happen, but the more closely you monitor, the less likely you are to miss out on things like big sales and "sampler packs" (Thanks, hairball!) that can help you plump out your spice rack of condiment juices without breaking the bank.
4) Know when to stop.
When you're running really low on those Boge HR cartomizers, if at some point you realized you've already put in more than a full working day of searching vendors and forum threads looking for somebody selling the things at that hefty discount, it's time to ask yourself how likely you are to locate a sale hefty enough to justify continued research instead of just reciting a card number to the nice people over at vaporsetc and letting them know you need some more cartomizers.
3) Unless you have money to spare and have taken up electric cigarettes as your new hobby, don't go buying every new thing that comes down the pike.
Use common sense. As is the case with all consumables, there are ongoing NEEDS, like cartomizers and juice and replacement/backup batteries, of the variety we know works for us, and there are things that we might WANT, but buying them will reduce our ability to pay for the things we NEED.
You can only spend a dollar once. And, yes, that is an outrage and should be changed.
If it's something like Colory Cartomizer Hats, which Hon Lik should have thought of, and you've been waiting for somebody to come to their senses and start making, of course you go get some immediately.
But if it's another one of those nu-Gos that come out about as often as V4L has a sale, treat yourself like you would a 7 year old and consider whether you'd rather have that nuGo, that might or might not be substantially better than what you've got, or the juice and cartomizers that you'll definitely need.
Don't worry. If that nuGo is really all that much better than the lastwee-Go, you'll hear about little else all over the forum.
As much as I love my new long and elegant V4L jeweled pushybuttons, if I hadn't received them as a gift, I doubt I'd have bought one until they'd been out for a while and a whole lot of people (whose other posts indicate that their throat hit preferences are similar to mine) had said they were substantially closer to a hookah-doodle - especially as these need their own special charger.
Now because these ARE substantially better than what I had, these are the ones I'll now take with me on outings to shaman and drugstore. I'll save my old ones - and their chargers - all put up in a safe place so I won't get confused, and gradually transition to the new ones by attrition.
Even though they do perform better, because they can't be used with my other chargers, I won't buy any for my UZAP** kit until one of my old batteries dies or I run into a situation where I need to PIF one to somebody even worse off than I am who prefers a little less throat hit.
Better products are supposed to happen. Market gaps are supposed to be filled.
But it's up to us to consider which new products really are better for US versus which ones are just better for the companies!
And when that new product requires the purchase of another new product, it's up to us to consider even harder.
We don't want to miss out on real improvements, but If it ain't broke, we don't need to fix it - and if even if it is broke, is it more broke than we are?
** Unscheduled Zombie Attack Preparedness
