Thursday, February 4, 2010

Free and...Easy?

I think I must be doing it wrong. "It" being Freecycle. You see, one of my "resolutibilities" that I plan to formally introduce in the next month or so, is to declutter and organize my house. Although I am a super unmotivated person, I knew that it would be dang near impossible a little difficult to get it all done in one month...so I'm cheating. I have started the process, which I will introduce in a different post someday, of organizing my house and forming routines for my housework. So far, I'm having great results, and my husband is more than happy to see this change in me. Not that he loved me any less before, but I think he appreciates not having to dig through piles of junk to find what he's looking for. The problem is, that I realized that my "baby" Boo is not so much a baby anymore, and that because of this, and the fact that she is our last baby (barring any 1 in 400 miracles) I have quite the surplus of baby stuff. Now, most of it I can ship off to my siblings who are still multiplying like rabbits of the childbearing age, but there are some of the "larger" baby items that just don't make sense to ship. You know, carseats, jumparoos, swings, all those things that came in pieces, but are now gigantic space wasters in your home. So, I had the stupid BRILLIANT idea to try to give them away via "Freecycle". Silly me thought that if you are shouting from the rooftops "Hey, over here! I've got FREE stuff!" there would be a line of people wanting it. Boy was I wrong. I signed up on the site about 3 days ago. Just this morning, I got an email asking me to confirm my zip code and city before they could complete my registration. I did, and then a few hours later my membership was approved! YAY ME! Time to PURGE! I read through all the gobbledy gook about privacy, safety, how to post things, (Because I've always heard you need to read the fine print, so I did) and once I was done I clicked on the link in the email that said "send message" or "post item"...not too sure on that, but I do know it was the right thing to click.
Or not...Oh, it pulled it up just fine, and I proceeded to spend the next 10 minutes carefully wording a listing with specifications of one of my items.
And send...
Exactly 8 seconds after hitting send I get a delivery failure notice. Tried this again, with the same result.
Okay...no problem. I'll just go to the Freecycle website and try to submit it that way. Well, apparently, according to the website, I do not belong to any groups, so I can't post stuff. I spent the next 30-45 minutes arguing with the links in the email, and trying to find what I could do to post this blingin' thing, when I came across an add on CraigsList for the same exact item I was trying to unload. Well heck fire! I had had enough. I abandoned my efforts to give away some of my baby stuff, and instead made a listing for some things on the newsletter that they hand out at my husband's company. Because, while I don't like to exploit people, if I can make $25 on something versus giving something away for free, I will most likely opt to make some quick money. Wouldn't you? I figure, if it doesn't sell, we can always try Freecycle again, but once you give it away, it's gone. Who knew giving something away would be harder than selling it? Not me!

1 comment:

Macey said...

Oh, girl, srsly, I have a good one. Okay, my husband and I were getting new furniture. So we needed to get rid of the old couch and loveseat...FREE. We posted it everywhere. I don't know how many people called and wanted to know what it looked like...if it was the right shade of green...what were the measurements, etc. It's FREE people. I was SO mad, I wanted to put it on the curb and say 25 bucks, knowing someone would steal it. If you put it out and say FREE, they won't touch it. Jerks.