Dead Giveaway

I realized recently that one of the reasons I hate to clean my apartment is that there's so much stuff that needs to be thrown out, and I simply don't have the heart to do so. Even completely defective items tend to make their home in my home; if I paid money for it, I want the product, dammit, even if it doesn't work.

Last night I finally began the process of instituting a purge on some of my more useless gadgets. On reflection, though, I decided that some of the still-functioning (and even one not-so-functioning) product may find decent homes elsewhere. (The dead DVD player, the archaic old computer from which I had already harvested the hard drive, and a dead VCR, however, will make their way to a trash bin very very soon.) So where else does a boy with things to give away turn? You got it: Craigslist.

I decided to give away:

(1) a bathroom lighting fixture. I replaced it with another one, but since the old one works fine, I didn't want to junk heap it.

(2) a cheap-ass digital camera. Seriously, it's so ghetto it doesn't even have a "preview picture" function. In that way, it's really no different at all from a 35mm camera, though I guess you don't need to pay to develop your crappy-ass pictures. Oh, I also don't know how much memory it holds on its own, but there's no room in it for any SD card or other external memory storage device.

(3) a wireless router. I swear, it doesn't work. I said as much in my ad! I set it up in my apartment, and my laptop -- a mere three inches from the antenna -- wouldn't pick up the signal. This despite the fact that my laptop will happily latch on to the signal coming from some neighbor named "Mike." But I figured if someone wanted to fiddle with it, more power to them. I wash my hands of it.

I posted the above ads just before and after midnight. As of 9:00 the next morning, I had received close to 80 emails. This includes emails wanting the wireless router (which I specifically said doesn't work!). CLers can be desperate, I guess. I mean, I expected someone would still be interested in these crappy stuff (okay, well, the light fixture really isn't all that crappy), but for people to be clamoring for them... wow. Two or three people actually wrote mini-essays on why they wanted the camera: one was a photojournalist who needed it for a work (if snapping photos is your career, you're gonna want a real camera, dude); another was a grad student in need of digital photos of something or another (I forget what, but it sounded legit), or wanted it for a charity. (Unfortunately, the charity ones came too late or I seriously would have considered them before giving them away to some random person.)

In any event, all these items left my hands within 48 hours after I clicked "Post" on CL. Hopefully the router won't become someone else's grand paper weight.

I wonder whether there's any interest out there in a dead DVD player, a dead VCR, and an archaic old computer shell with no hard drive.