‘I’m sorry, $45? For a second-hand copy of ‘Fantastic Contracts & Where To Find Them: An Introduction To The Law Of Contract?’ Do I look like I’m made of money?’
Coming into another semester, students are faced with the eternal problem of textbooks. Are they necessary? Will they be used? Are they worth the money? Are they just an elaborate ego trip for career academics who can only point to a single chapter of an eight-hundred page textbook as evidence that their life has meant something?
But for some students, the financial cost of textbooks is more burdensome than others. Particularly for Miranda Hadley (20), a third-year Law student and prolific financier of the fine dining and classy drinking establishment, Friday’s Riverside.
Miranda struggles to piece together the $45 required for a secondhand textbook. Of course, this isn’t helped by the fact she regularly, happily drops over $300 on a night out.
And she calls that a Tuesday!
With a transaction history peppered by vodka sodas, vodka cranberries, late-night kebabs, and the occasional pale ale (it’s a Friday afternoon in Queensland, as if you’d want anything other than a beer), Miranda finds herself in dire financial straits every Monday morning.
And that’s before she considers all the Uber debt she accumulated from conveniently ‘forgetting’ to accept split requests from her friends. She expects those to start rolling in fairly soon.
When we interviewed Miranda about her textbook-purchasing struggles, she described the $40-60 range that many textbooks fall into as ‘daylight fucking robbery.’
‘It’s a complete joke. How can those rich boomers, writing their rich textbooks, with their rich laptops, expect us to afford them? We can’t even torrent them because the Federal Court blocked Pirate Bay. Um, pretty fucking dog, am I right?’
When we suggested a textbook loan program, her eyes lit up, and she remarked ‘That’s exactly like when I ask someone if I can ‘loan’ their drink, and they I just drink it and never give it back! So I can ‘loan’ a textbook, and just keep it?’
Despite our protests, that really does seem to be her plan. Cannot wait to see how this one shapes up.
Probably some more to come.