k0an.com

Since Christmas is coming up and there are a lot of gifts to get others (and myself) I decided to get rid of all the extra junk in the house to make some extra money.

The first category of junk are the items that aren't worth the effort to sell but since I hate throwing things away I have to give them away. I put the following items up on Craigslist for free and they were all claimed within 24 hours!

• 3 ancient laptops (probably couldn't even run Windows 95)
• slightly rusted Weber charcoal grill
• 2 barely working hand held carpet cleaners
• a papasan chair with a broken frame
• cordless phone with digital answering machine (missing power cord)
• ancient ironing board from the '70s

They were all claimed without incident except for the answering machine. A lady emailed me that she wanted to pick it up but that her husband died (she described the circumstances of his death in three long paragraphs) and she had to wait for a friend to drive her. Then she proceeded to forward me several random emails from her friends that had jokes and random pictures on them. I think she didn't know how to reply to my email or create a new email so she thought she had to forward an email to me in order to communicate with me. I told her she can pick up the phone on my porch. I don't want to get trapped in a conversation with her.

The other category of items I wanted to get rid of were worth something so I sold them on eBay. The first few transactions went OK but then when I sold Samantha's old cell phone the buyer said the box arrived but that there was no cell phone or power supply in the box. At first I thought he was trying to scam me which made me mad but then I saw that he had a 100% feedback rating with over 350 purchases/sales. So then I called the UPS Store and the owner said she wasn't surprised and that it's common for UPS employees to take things from boxes. She said that since I shipped the cell phone in its original cell phone box that made it a tempting target for an employee. The good thing is that even though I only sold the phone for $35 or so on eBay UPS will pay me what it is worth new up to $100! So, I ended up making a decent amount of money on the deal. It's good to know that UPS has free insurance up to $100.

So, I've earned some spending money and I can now see the floor of my office so I'd say it all turned out OK.