We held our yard sale today. It was originally supposed to be yesterday, but we totally chickened out after seeing the ENTIRELY incorrect weather forecast for the Seattle area on weather.com (as one of my friends put it, "They never give Seattle enough credit."). We didn't realize what a big deal it would be to reschedule for the next day, but apparently we screwed up ... BIG time.
The problem begins with our over-preparedness. We had advertised our yard sale on craigslist to maximize our customer base. In the wonderful craigslist ad that Rachel wrote, she also listed some of the sweet gear that we were making available to the public at greatly discounted prices. Among this sweet gear was a particularly coveted roll of bubble wrap, which is probably the second piece leading to this particular woe: our stuff was too awesome ... or at least, people really like bubble wrap.
So we decided to postpone the yard sale from yesterday to today, seeing that the liars at weather.com were predicting sunny warmth all day. We deleted our old ad on craigslist and replaced it with an updated one but did not think to do anything more than that to cover our tracks. Little did we know what a can of you-know-what we had opened!
And we wouldn't find out until the next day (today) when we arrived at the site of the yard sale (our friend's house) and were told that, not only did one overzealous customer come knocking on their door yesterday at 8am looking for a space heater, but they also received a bit of what they termed "hate mail" taped to their door. It went something like this:
"Sure hope it's nothing serious -- but what happened to the yard sale?? FYI -- if you cancel or postpone, it would be nice to leave a note. Some of us got here at 8am."
The letter was written on the back of a printout of our craigslist ad. We had upset a true planner. And we felt some small amount of remorse about it, too, but we did share a chuckle.
It wasn't until later in the sale that a dowdy middle-aged woman with a bit of a grumpy face walked up to our sale, scouring the premises for what appeared to be something very specific. When I finally made eye contact with her, she demanded to know where the "large roll of bubble wrap" was. I informed her that it had been claimed, only to be subjected to several exasperated sighs and the declaration that the bubble wrap was her entire reason for coming out to the sale today ... and apparently -- as she went on to say -- for coming out the day before, as well. The dowdy grumpster proceeded to quasi-shout a litany of complaints that almost exactly mirrored the above-quoted letter, revealing herself to be our hate mailer ... as well as a real fan of bubble wrap. Rather than confront her about any of these oddities, I apologized profusely and then looked away until she skulked off.
Don't let this happen to you. Have a care, if you hold a yard sale, and realize that people really do love them and take them incredibly seriously. For some it truly seems like some kind of competitive sport or cutthroat part-time job ... and you really just don't want to get in the way of that.
Speaking of quasi-hate mail, check out this website chronicling some hilarious and disturbing passive aggressive notes.
And speaking of nothing at all related to anything else in this post, check out this website of the place I went to yesterday and risked life and limb to make a bunch of fools eat my dust in go-cart racing!
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