Why murbot and everybody else sells stuff on eBay
Yeesh
Make sure to check out the pic of the mom with the cucumber on page 2 too.
"A++++++, would read this thread again."
ROFL.
EDIT: SELL. SELL.
Make sure to check out the pic of the mom with the cucumber on page 2 too.
"A++++++, would read this thread again."
ROFL.
EDIT: SELL. SELL.
Comments
Best post over there:
"Teach her a life lesson. Burn it all to the ground."
Or I should say:
OCD.
She could make herself rich. Ride the internetwave of this and then sell it at eBay as "A part of the largest privately owned garbage collection of the world". People buy crap from that place.
Any alternative suggestions, pejorative or otherwise?
tchotchkaholic?
Yet while still struggling to grasp the orders of magnitude required, I admit,
a macabre curiosity about how much garage sale table space (in hectares or acres) to display it all...
more items in that house than sell on eBay in ___ months? ...
if each item had its own page, more pages than Microsoft? ..
if stretched end to end would reach all the way to ... ??
My mother hoarded food, as well as "collectible" dolls and other Franklin Mint-ish kinds of things. My father hoards books, CDs, cassettes, videotapes, plus other assorted stuff that to anyone else is obviously junk, but about which he will say "It's still good. Somebody might be able to use.", often throwing in some mention of the original price or "That could be fixed" if the junk is clearly broken junk.
He has piles of videotapes of various TV shows, usually educational programs, that he's absolutely certain are going to be of enormous value to his grandchildren, who in his fantasy world he imagines filled with delight at being privileged to received this treasure trove of learning and entertainment. He has a similar attitude towards his collection of audio cassettes of classical musical recorded from FM radio.
He had sent me quite a number of classical music CDs, many of which he sent simply because he discovered that he'd already purchased the same CDs, so he'd give me the duplicates. Some of the stuff really was good music, but I seldom felt like I had to time to go through the it all (typically sent in batches of 10-20 at a time), so I think my often muted enthusiasm and failure to be able to comment on specific pieces of music eventually quelled this particular desire to share his hoarding with me.
At least temporarily. He still talks about me inheriting this stuff, or even storing some of his collection for him. Fortunately, 1500 miles of distance and the constant refrain "I don't really have a place to put it" are holding up as a solid defense.
My father's hoarding has been slowed down by old age and by living in an assisted-living apartment. (Although he's renting a two-bedroom apartment so that one room could be stuff full of books.) I'm sure the staff would like the place to be even less cluttered than it currently is, but they've made it clear that he has to maintain a modicum of control or lose his lease.
Much of the hoard was reduced when my mother died, and reduced again when my father moved out of their old house into the new apartment. My family and I (mostly my sister Martha who lives nearby) were at least able to force a few tough decisions on my father to trim down the stockpile under these circumstances. My father talked about renting storage space, then said no, it was too expensive -- but he might have wavered back the other way again, based on a comment I only vaguely remember. (I'll have to ask Martha -- there may well be some portion of the original hoard sitting in rented storage bin somewhere.)
I spent a few days during one visit to the old house helping to clean it out, but that few days was nothing compared to the work that Martha and some other family members did before I got down there, or after I left. It was an amazingly large task to clean out that house.
Since this kind of thing runs in families, I suppose I have to wonder if I'm at risk. I haven't hit the golden age of 50 when it's supposed to really kick in, but then again, my parents were pack rats well before that age.
I do have a tendency towards clutter, but it's mostly procrastination and laziness about throwing stuff out and keeping things orderly. My dislike of clutter has a much lower threshold than either of my parents, however, so I clean up and throw stuff out well before things get out of hand. One thing I?m thankfully free from is my father?s bizarre sense of the value of things.
I?m sure that his sense of value is partially based on growing up poor during the Depression, but even then, I think it?s more just plain-old OCD. ?Waste not, want not? taken to absurd extreme, coupled with a complete inability to form an objective view of an item?s value, an inability to stop worrying that something good might get thrown away.
An incident I remember from the mid-eighties that really show?s my father?s bizarre perspective on things: He had a shed built in the backyard of our old house in New Jersey for storing excess books. A lot of the books were textbooks and workbooks of various sorts (my father was a high school teacher), or painfully erudite tomes, like someone?s criticism of someone else?s criticism of someone?s poetry.
The shed did well enough to keep direct rain and snow off the books, but it was hardly weatherproof or mouse-proof. Eventually, most of this stuff had to be thrown away because of its poor condition. I was living in New Hampshire at the time, and on one trip down to New Jersey I was recruited into helping clean up this mess.
We were throwing the books away in large, clear plastic bags. I don?t know why we were using clear bags -- I suppose they were just conveniently available or cheap or something. Anyway, when my father saw this, he insisted that we get opaque bags and re-bag what we?d already put out on the curb for pick-up.
Why? Well, because of the mess that would be made when kids saw bags full of (oh, boy!) BOOKS! My father had in mind some sort of roving bands of scholar/vandal creatures, hungry for learning, so thirsting for knowledge that the sight of naked books in the street would drive them into a mad trash-strewing frenzy.
Even if this stuff had a vague chance of being mistaken (which it didn't) for piles of old Playboys, his scenario seemed unlikely. My father's concern stemmed completely from him imagining kids seeing the books for exactly what they were -- textbooks, poetry, philosophy, intellectual discourse. My sisters and I tried to explain the scholar/vandal contradiction to my father to no avail.
Originally posted by shetline
We were throwing the books away in large, clear plastic bags. I don?t know why we were using clear bags -- I suppose they were just conveniently available or cheap or something. Anyway, when my father saw this, he insisted that we get opaque bags and re-bag what we?d already put out on the curb for pick-up.
Why? Well, because of the mess that would be made when kids saw bags full of (oh, boy!) BOOKS! My father had in mind some sort of roving bands of scholar/vandal creatures, hungry for learning, so thirsting for knowledge that the sight of naked books in the street would drive them into a mad trash-strewing frenzy.
Beware the academics. They rove the streets in packs looking for literature, and innocent civilians to converse with. Typically unwashed, with straggly beards, and the sweet smell of stale urine, they debate philosophy and quantum physics with ease.
There's a portion of the book "Lucifer's Hammer" (Larry Niven) where a professor-type carefully, and in secret, buries a bunch of books in his yard/house so that he might be able to return and salvage them AFTER the huge comet plows into the Earth. It's that desire to preserve knowledge that drives the logic behind the preservation of books.
It's that "this stuff should be in a museum one day" kind of attitude. But man, that'd have to be one BIG ASS museum to hold all the crap we all hoard.
Originally posted by BRussell
OMG.
Or I should say:
OCD.
Yup. A particularly difficult-to-treat form of OCPD, in fact. I had some vague recollection of hoarding being an indication of schizophrenia, but it's apparently most common in OCPD.
I am very much a packrat but I have a wonderful wife who saves my from myself. She will go through all my "treasures" periodically and ask me what is truly going to happen to them. I will avail her of some unsaid plans for those items that I am sure will come to fruition someday. The rule is that it gets one six month reprieve. If it is still sitting there 6 months later and I still haven't even touched it, we both agree it has to go.
Thus my life has remained relatively uncluttered. But heaven help me if I actually get an extra room after the kids move out someday, a spare shed, or whatever.
Nick
i knew the wife existed but kids?
anyway. its strange that i know someone who SELLS stuff on ebay whose house looks like that. same idea except in reverse.
Another friend too. He makes a living buying shit at auctions and selling the shit back on E-bay. House is filled with shit up to the rafters.
Ebay must be either a godsend or a curse for these people...