Pencil, 50 cents

My family and I went to stay at a house at the beach recently, and when we got there we realised there wasn’t a pencil to be found and that we hadn’t brought one with us. This was a problem as my boyfriend was halfway through a sudoku puzzle, so the first thing we did was visit a local op shop to buy one. We found a pencil easily enough, but we also found a few interesting books to buy, and this made the pencil redundant because it soon became clear that the only reason he was doing a sudoku puzzle in the first place was because he was between books.