Who taught: Kara, Julie and James

These days, the coding competition, we call it IO days, is a big thing in my company. Maximum 4 people become one team and code really crazy for about 3 and half days and come up with the innovative feature that can bring a lot of benefits to our customers. The winning team gets a pretty big prize. My team members are Julie, Kara, James and me. Our team name is IO_Candy. Haha, IO_Candy FTW. Yay!

Anyway, today, we had our second team meeting for brainstorming our great ideas. In the middle of the meeting, Kara used this expression, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free!” When I first heard it, I thought it means literally why would you want to invest your money on something if you can get the major product from it for free. So, I told them, “Well you can still eat the cow!” And…..they laughed. James answered me, “But then you have to kill the cow!” We laughed again. Julie told me it actually means like “why would you want to get married, when you can get all the benefits of marriage without getting married!” I will let you imagine about the benefits of marriage here. I think the benefit here is the only one. But I do think there are a lot more benefits and happiness of marriage. So, I wanna say, “You do not know about the benefits of marriage until you really get married! But there are also disadvantages of marriage. So, I hope you make a wise decision and be happy with it! YMMV!”  (Andrew, how is my usage of “YMMV” here?? Good?)

I am still not sure we can use the expression to describe the situation like what I originally thought. Maybe not??? This is kind of expression that you do not really want to use if you do not know the real meaning of it. It would be really awkward if you use it wrong.