{"id":175,"date":"2009-07-23T14:16:48","date_gmt":"2009-07-23T20:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/?p=175"},"modified":"2009-07-23T18:23:53","modified_gmt":"2009-07-24T00:23:53","slug":"craigslist-renews-my-faith-in-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/?p=175","title":{"rendered":"Craigslist Renews My Faith In Humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

To be honest, I’m really not sure if I should be referring to that as my lack<\/em> of faith in humanity, but whatever it was, Craigslist readers managed to affirm the Hell out of it.<\/p>\n

I’ll start with the ad I posted:<\/p>\n

For Sale: $10 firm, you pick it up
\n21″ HP CRT computer monitor
\nThis is big monitor, about 45 pounds, so I’m not shipping it anywhere.
\nThe front of the CRT is flat, but I’m not calling it a “flat screen”
\nto avoid confusion with LCD monitors.
\nThe monitor is about 10 years old, but in excellent condition, with no burn in.<\/h4>\n

Pretty reasonable deal, eh?\u00a0 That doesn’t stop Craiglist readers from trying to make this deal even better<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Hey, I can use a bigger monitor.\u00a0 Can you deliver it to [a place about 100 miles away.]
\nIf it works perfectly and it’s really clean (and I still need it) when you get here, I’ll give you $5 cash on the spot.<\/h4>\n

I have a pretty efficient car, but at today’s fuel prices, I estimate that the round trip to your place will cost me about $20, so that even if you paid the least bit of attention to the word “firm,” I’d be $10 behind, not to mention four hours of pointless driving.\u00a0 To seal the deal, there’s the possibility I’d be driving back home with this 45 pound behemoth of a monitor, since you may have found an even better deal<\/em> during the two hours it would take me to get to your house.\u00a0 Presumably some hot naked chick with a brand new flat screen television willing to drive it across the country and drop it off with a few cases of free beer.<\/p>\n

But I have to give the guy a little credit for at least understanding the listing.\u00a0 I got a smattering of emails that could be answered simply by copying and pasting the listing they were responding to in the first place:<\/p>\n

Is this a flat screen LCD or a tube-kind of monitor?<\/h4>\n

Is this for a computer or is it a television set?<\/h4>\n

How heavy is this monitor?\u00a0 I’m thinking of putting it on a shelf.<\/h4>\n

Will you ship this to me?<\/h4>\n

And my personal favorite:<\/p>\n

How big is the 21″ screen?<\/h4>\n

I’m not sure if this person is just really, really<\/em> stupid or just wants me to do the conversion into centimeters or cubits or something for them. I’d like to think he smacked himself in the head immediately after hitting “send” because he realized he had asked an obvious question — because the alternative is that no conceivable reply could possibly make him understand the size of this monitor.<\/p>\n

Other questions at least asked about things that weren’t answered in the listing, mostly because it never would have occurred to me to answer these questions, much less that anybody would ask them.<\/p>\n

What colors does this monitor display?<\/h4>\n

Has anything been living in this monitor or died in its case?<\/h4>\n

Do you think this monitor will make my computer faster?<\/h4>\n

How much storage (MB or GB) does this monitor have?<\/h4>\n

Does this come with a computer?<\/h4>\n

Has this monitor ever been used for viewing porn?<\/h4>\n

Here again, I have a personal favorite, from somebody whom I hope misread something and really didn’t eat that big a bowl of crazy for breakfast:<\/p>\n

Is this fully mature?\u00a0 How big do you think it will grow?<\/h4>\n

Shame on me, I guess, for not mentioning that this monitor has already grown to its full size in the original ad.\u00a0 I’ll remember that for next time.<\/p>\n

It’s possible, I guess, that all these people are just pretending<\/em> to be morons and lunatics in order to screw with me, but there are naturally a few whose purpose is explicitly to screw with me — or more accurately, screw me over:<\/p>\n

I’ll bring a check for $210 for that monitor, if you’ll give me $180 in
\ntwenties when I pick it up.\u00a0 You’ll get $30 out of the deal for your trouble.<\/h4>\n

For $180 and a monitor, I’ll get a bad check in return, so I’m not entirely clear on where the $30 comes in.\u00a0 Maybe he’ll mail it to me later care of my address in Gullible Idiotville.\u00a0 He’s not the only person who thinks that’s where I live:<\/p>\n

I will pay you $10 plus $100 in shipping and other fees if you will ship this to Nigeria.
\nI will send you cash money by FedEx but I need it right away so please ship when I give you the FedEx tracking number if this is agreeable to you we can do business.<\/h4>\n

Nigera?\u00a0 FedEx?\u00a0 Cash money?\u00a0 What could possibly go wrong?\u00a0 Oh, right, it might actually cost more than $100 to ship a 45 lb. package to Nigera using any possible method of getting it there “right away.”\u00a0 Plus the odds of this guy actually shipping me an envelope full of “cash money” for my trouble seems about as likely as me suddenly being declared the Pope.<\/p>\n

But at least these scammers\u00a0 sort of paid attention to the listing.\u00a0 Other scammers were more lazy:<\/p>\n

It seems like you could use some money.\u00a0 We have money to give away!
\nTo start, send us your:
\nFull Name:
\nFull Address:
\nSocial Security Number:
\nFull bank account number where we can make a deposit:
\nAmount you need:<\/h4>\n

Yes, it’s true, my motivation for selling a 21″ monitor for $10 is not to find it a good home instead of letting perfectly good hardware rot in a landfill, but because I need $10 to pay my mortgage.\u00a0 Or something.\u00a0 At any rate, I guess I can just keep the monitor, because, hey, free money.<\/p>\n

The depressing part of that is that somebody must<\/em> exist who would actually reply with this information — who still has an account with actual money in it<\/em>, and despite this,\u00a0 manages to believe that there’s some other idiot in existence who desperately wants to pump money into the bank account of a random moron for no conceivable reason.\u00a0 Now that I think of it, Craigslist might be a good way to find such a person.<\/p>\n

Epilogue:<\/p>\n

Yes, I did sell the monitor to a reasonably sane and intelligent person for $10, so at least one person who reads Craigslist isn’t a complete maniac.\u00a0 I accept the fact that he could be a partial<\/em> maniac, but he at least held it together long enough to complete a simple transaction, which up until now I thought was a pretty easy thing for most people to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To be honest, I’m really not sure if I should be referring to that as my lack of faith in humanity, but whatever it was, Craigslist readers managed to affirm the Hell out of it. I’ll start with the ad I posted: For Sale: $10 firm, you pick it up \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[93,95,94],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}