The Buhner.com Blog

This was going to be the “about Tony” entry, but that’ll come later. I’ll just say for now that he’s back for two weeks, and it’s a very awesome thing.

Anyway, I’ve got a 17 inch monitor that I’ve had since I had “Whitey”, my old Dell from ‘98. It’s still a good functional monitor, and outside of a little cosmetic damage to the casing, it’s perfectly fine. However, living where I do, I can’t afford to have 25+ pound paperweights hanging around for “just in case”. Plus, I was given orders to get rid of it, and I refuse to take something that is fully fuctional to the dump and PAY to get rid of it.

So I go to my buddy craigslist.org to get rid of it. At first, I post it for $20, and throw in my functioning but oddly coloring HP 882c inkjet printer. No takers.

After a few weeks, I decide to just put the thing in the “free” section, because no one apparently wants to pay money for a printer. Sure enough, within MINUTES of posting it, I started to get emails from people quite willing to take my free fully functional monitor.

My provisions: you had to pick it up. Sounds easy, right?

The first person who responded asked where I was located. In the listing, it says “Bridgehampton” right next to “printer”. I explained that I was in Bridgehampton. She responded that she was in Queens. She lost. The next person who responded was also in the five boroughs area.

The next I wish I could have given the stuff to. They were two grandmothers in Harlem who did all kinds of charitable things for local youth, from fixing up computers to those who couldn’t otherwise afford one to giving people suits for job interviews - very cool. They even offered me $20 to bring it to them since they didn’t have a car. Unfortunately, they were located in Manhattan (obviously - Harlem), and I really couldn’t drive over 100 miles to deliver a monitor.

The emails kept coming in. Generally, they went like this: I want your stuff, ok, I’m in Bridgehampton, when can you come pick it up, oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know where you were/I don’t know where Bridgehampton is. I even had a few that thought I was giving away a whole computer (one asked if it came with a modem - to my knowledge, very few monitors come with modems). All together 11 responces, and only three that had anything useful to say - the Harlem people (that’s just a good story, hav eto see if there’s something we can do with them), someone who pointed me to a Yahoogroup where Eastern LI people swapped stuff, and one person from Port Jeff who was willing to come out if I could wait until the weekend.

I’m going to end up giving the thing away to my co-worker who lives in Sag Harbor. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that earlier. Then again, I wouldn’t have gotten so many interesting responces. Craigslist is full of some “interesting” people, to say the least.