Selective Seller

During Friday's post I mentioned I was trying to get someone to take an organ from my parents' house using Craig's List. What I neglected to mention was that hidden among all the bad jokes and obvious spam mail there were actually a couple of real people who just wanted a free musical instrument. Unfortunately, no one from a church or charitable musical organization came forward willing to take it, which meant I was going to have to just give it away to an individual. Now, unlike when you are trying to sell something through the internet and can eliminate the people who make really low-ball offers, I've discovered giving things away is more of a matter of picking someone and contacting them back. Obviously, since my parents' house is not a store I did not want to have four people show up at the same time and I also didn't want to contact three people and tell them the organ was still available, only to have to write two of them back later and tell them never mind. These left me in the awkward position of simply having to randomly pick someone as the 'winner' and hoping they would actually follow through with picking the organ up. With nothing more than an initial email to go on, I pretty much had to make some wild guesses about people and whether or not they were reliable to try and narrow down the options.

First, as a grammar snob, I was pretty dismissive of people who couldn't spell or left out words. I've written this before, but in the days of spell-check and auto-correct, the only reason to have a poorly-written email is because you are too lazy to take the 10 extra seconds to check your message before you hit send. That doesn't sound like someone who will take the time to practice the organ and since I wanted it to go someplace it would be used, they were passed. (At least I can appreciate the irony of that statement, since we were giving away this organ because it was never used. But, when you are the person doing the giving away you can be a little hypocritical.) On top of that, I got slightly annoyed that I was offering a perfectly good musical instrument for free and quite a few people couldn't be bothered to write a complete sentence. One guy's email just said, "Organ available?" I send longer messages to let people know when I am running 5 minutes late. It just convinced me that anyone who would send an email like that would be unreliable when coming to pick it up and since I was up against a deadline, that wasn't an option. After that, one-sentence emailers were also eliminated from consideration.

Also, anyone whose email was tagged with "Sent from my iPhone" was also dismissed. I'm well aware that just because a person has one nice thing in their life it does not automatically mean they have a house full of new stuff. I went to school with a kid who drove a Lexus but couldn't rub two nickles together most of the time. (That seemed like more an issue of priorities.) I also believe that just because a person has money that doesn't mean they should be kept from getting a good deal. Just because you could spend a little extra doesn't mean you have to. I'm pretty sure that hunting for good deals is how most of the wealthy people in this country stay that way. The problem is that I believe if you are upgrading your life, you have to get pretty far down the list before you arrive at purchasing a brand-new $500 cellphone. Even if it was a couple of generations old, that was still a pretty penny. If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford to buy an organ.  Not to mention, I find the "Sent from my iPhone" signature to be slightly douchey. It feels like the sender is bragging, as if what kind of phone you have actually makes you special. Since I wanted the organ to go to someone who would appreciate it, the iPhones were skipped.

Lastly, I had to whittle the candidates down a little more and used the only piece of information I had left - names. I'm not saying that I ignored certain emails because of the name which was attached, but I did ignore emails which didn't come with any name to them. Since these people were going to have to come to my parents house to pick up the organ and I wanted a little information on them in return. The biggest problem with any transaction through Craig's List is that you never know who could be on the other end of a response. Just the other week there was a story on the news about people getting robbed when trying to sell some electronics on the site. So being able to at least have a name for a quick Google search before sending them the address seemed only fair in my head. (I got lucky in that the last names weren't particularly common.) If the email was simply tagged by a couple of seemingly random letters, they weren't getting a response. In the end I was left with only one candidate. I'm not sure if that meant my whittling process was a success or too harsh, but considering the kid I ultimately emailed back showed up on time with a vehicle capable of transporting the organ that day and even had an extra pair of hands to help load it, I would say it worked out about as well as I could have hoped.