Thursday, May 27, 2010

This is Going to be a Chore

So, with the move coming up, Sunny and I have precisely one fuck ton of things to sell.

Earlier this week I decided to give Craigslist a try. The thing is, we don't know exactly how long it'll take to get Sunny's Visa sorted. It could be a week, it could be six months…so we're having to wait until we actually get her Visa before we can sell anything major.

Long story short, we don't want to be sitting on the floor with no furniture or TV for six months.

So, about six months ago I bought some PC memory online and bought the wrong size. Because there was nothing wrong with it, they wouldn't take it back. I figured it would be something easy to throw on craiglist to try it out.

Cue the parade of retarded emails.

I mean, seriously… I was getting emails from people that were treating the purchase of 4 gigs of RAM for forty bucks as though they were shelling out a few hundred grand on a new house.

I honestly couldn't tell if these people were retarded or just really, really talentless scammers.

The first asked me what 'guarantees' I could give him that the memory would work with his computer. Deciding honesty was the best policy, I answered 'none'. I told him I'd bought the memory, saw it was the wrong size, the online store wouldn't take it back so I just put it back in the box and put it in my desk drawer. If he wanted to buy it, it would be at his own risk.

He replied by basically accusing me of trying to cheat him. That no 'real seller' would try to sell memory without guaranteeing it. I pointed out to him that a scammer would absolutely guarantee it would work and do anything to get him to buy it…but three back and forth emails later and he was talking about 'informing the police'. I'll spare you my response, but it contained a good few four letter words.

However, my absolute favorite was the guy who asked, totally seriously, if he could meet me somewhere, pick up the memory, take it to his house to see if it worked…and if it did, then he promised he'd totally come back and pay me. When I wrote back and told him there was no fucking way, then he got all offended that I mistrusted him…especially when I said I'd be totally willing to do that, as long as he left a forty dollar deposit.

Ok, if it's this hard to sell something as simple as PC memory for half its retail price (forty bucks)…exactly how hard is it going to be to sell some of our 'big ticket' items like our car?

So…any sane people want 4 gigs of PC memory?

4 comments:

Kraneia said...

I got two lil words for ya, buddy.

FLEA MARKET.

If you aren't terribly worried about how much you get for stuff, and need to get it gone in a hurry, that is.

Most flea markets, you pay a small fee to set up a table. Basically it's a yard sale with more shoppers. Yeah, you'll have to deal with people personally, some of which are REALLY retarded. But if they give you too many problems, you can call security.

Just a thought, hope that helps.

Scratch

Sunny said...

Luckily, he already has built in security.
And yeah- a yard sale is our first plan of action and then the flea market the following day for what we don't sell at the yard-sale...but Craigs List is where we're starting.
We had thought there were more intelligent people shopping from there.
I suppose there are nutters everywhere tho.
:-)

Little Red said...

Surely the bloke who wanted a guarantee that the memory would work with his computer could have simply just checked online to see if it was compatible with his system?

Paulius said...

You'd think, wouldn't you?