Sometimes you can't even give it away

Craiglist provides a fantastic service: it's free, relatively easy to use, and reaches a much wider audience than many free classified ad services. The problem is that it attracts an absolutely bizarre clientele.

I've been wanting to get a new mattress, and the move provided me with a good excuse to make the switch: rather than shipping my old one back across the country I could get rid of it here and buy new once I'm back East. An 8 year old mattress isn't worth a whole lot, so I posted it on Craigslist as being free for whoever wanted to pick it up. I got a response pretty quickly, and we agreed she would come last weekend.

Nothing.

So I re-posted the ad on Monday figuring that I had just found one of the flakey people who cruise CL. On Tuesday I got an email from the girl apologizing for not checking her messages and telling me she still wanted the mattress. I responded that she needed to come on Wednesday night, and she agreed.

Until Wednesday, when I got a text message (really, her only method of communication) saying she wasn't sure if she could come by. Specifically, she said this:

Hey! I haven't checked messages yet, wast sure if u called! im at a police station now or wld call u bk! how late can I get it?

Now, I'm not an expert, but I think that being at a police station indicates something is "up". Especially when this is the followup message:

I dont know how long i am going to have to be here since i am helping a friend report something. is there any possible way that time tomorrow i cld get it?

Dicey. So I decided to donate the mattress rather than dealing with the CL flakes (probably the most connected flakey population on earth). I called the Salvation Army, and they promised to stop by on Thursday morning. Which they did, only to tell me that my mattress doesn't meet their standards. If you have ever felt ashamed by a piece of furniture try having the Salvation Army tell you that your mattress can't even be given away.

At the end of the day I had to call 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which is a pricey but good service. Unfortunately they do not have employees who understand geometry, and so coaching them on how to get my box spring into the elevator was, to say the least, a chore. At one point they decided to try and break the box spring in half rather than backing out and putting it in the way that it would fit.

After all that I got a text message from police girl asking if it was cool to get the mattress next week. Idiots.