On 2010-03-07, Larry Jaques wrote:
On Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:59:44 -0600, the infamous Ignoramus26053
scrawled the following:

On 2010-03-07, GeoLane at PTD dot NET GeoLane wrote:
They were still available after 3:30 Saturday afternoon. People had
called but didn't come over to pick them up at least so far. I
inquired whether I could send him money to put a bunch in a flat rate
box and send them to me, but he didn't want to be bothered.

Not to generalize, but I find people who watch free pickup ads to be
very flaky, stupid, and just incapable of normal human function. As
any generalization, there are exceptions, but the proportion of
unreliable people exceeds all bounds. It is understandable from the
economics standpoint.

A case in point.

I advertised free pallets in the morning today.

One woman called and said that she will pick them up.

She came in a minivan with a husband.

She looked at the pallets, and said, GET THIS: that she needed boards
for her "art paintings" and that these pallets are "too dirty to be
painted".

WTF??? ??????????????? *&^&*%&*%^!!!

Yeah, there are some real weirdos out there.

You put it very mildly


I was quite upset by this pallet board art lunacy, and just started
cutting up and burning those m-f-ing pallets in the firepit. My kids
love playing with fire, under my supervision, so we all had a good
time.

So I burned three pallets out of five. Then a guy calls me at 6pm and
says that he wants the remaining pallets. Said he will stop by "very
soon" as he is in a neighboring town.

It is 4 hours later and there is no trace of him.

It is a very typical experience with "freecycle" and "free section of
craigslist" people.

That has been my experience with these folks, too. You'd think that
if it's free, they'd jump at the chance and come right away.

My theory is this: they do jump on this. And then 5 minutes later they
forget all about it.

We are talking about people who want to pick up others trash and have
no money to begin with. Pretty much most people like that are complete
basket cases.

Did I have completely well adjusted, reilable people pick up stuff
advertised in free sections? Yes. Were those the majority? Not
really. Most were weirdos or flakes of one sort or another.

Now I put the stuff out on the driveway with the person's name on it
and go about my business. It's usually gone within 3 days of their
saying "I'll be right over."

I put out 400 lbs of ferrous scrap on my curb yesterday, it was gone
in 1.5 hours.

Far too many people just don't have any integrity any more.

You know, it is not like they defrauded me or anything. I would not
use word "integrity" in this context.

i