Recent Giveaways

In an ongoing (painfully slow) process of trying to de-clutter my life and thereby get my apartment a little cleaner, I advertised on freecycle.org recently to give away a hair dryer.

My ad was very honest: I gave the model number for the dryer, and described it as being from my college days (though I didn't mention specifically just how many years I've been out of college). Also, immediately afterward I posted an ad giving away law books, which also could conceivably tip my hand as to my age and, thus, the age of the hair dryer.

I got a response very quickly and handed it off that night. Very handy.

One woman who responded asked: "Does this hair dryer have hair comb attachments?"

Lady, do you really think a 19-year-old male really cared about comb attachments?

***

It's wonderful the kind of things you can give away on the internet nowadays. I had to get rid of my old desktop computer (same ongoing painfully slow effort) and, again, was incredibly blunt about it. I described it as:

- old
- running a slow processor
- possessing an old memory card

I also mentioned that it's slow. As a final straw, I told my audience that because I don't have shredding software, I was simply going to remove the hard drive too, so really the machine was going to come without a hard drive or operating system either. Who wants it?

I managed to give it away the next day to a woman whose son's PC had recently blew up. She intended to use the shell and transfer necessary components to my machine. It was quite a fortuitous matchup.

***

Somehow I have failed to give small random assortment of shot glasses that I have on one of my shelves. I just don't want them anymore. Not that no one showed any interest; at least seven people emailed to say they wanted to pick them up. But none of them followed through, and now I still have the damn glasses. Grrrr. I'll report that ad soon.

***

I'm looking around my apartment, trying desperately to decide what else I could give away or sell. At some point I'll also need to place a bunch of old clothes in a bag and give those away too. I have far too many.