Coffee heat rising

Privacy: It’s none of their business

Peter at Bible Money Matters reports that when he called American Express to cancel an old credit card account that hadn’t been used in years, he was blitzed with a high-pressure pitch to keep the card. Among other things, the person who answered his phone call asked him why he would want to cancel a perfectly fine credit card. One of Peter’s readers also reported having been asked a similar question and then pursuedwith attempts to discuss balances on other cards and her arrangements for emergency funds. Wow! All of these matters come under the heading of nobody’s business but yours. Stand in front of the mirror and practice uttering these phrases:
That’s none of your business.
Why do you want to know?
I don’t share that kind of information with strangers.

Be prepared to use them at the drop of a hat.

The psychology of phone interactions between companies and consumers is fascinating. Decades ago, my mother worked for the phone company in California. Part of her job was to check up on fraudulent long-distance calls, which in those days were pretty easy to make. When a customer called in and said a call to thus-&-such a number was incorrectly billed to him, she would telephone the number and ask whoever answered who had called them at the time and date shown on the bill. Amazingly, when asked point-blank most people would blurt out the perp’s name without thinking.

She said she’d been taught during the phone company’s training sessions that when confronted with an unexpected personal question, most people will answer honestly before they think about it. A lot of the conversation that Peter and his readers report entails having some minimum wage employee at a phone bank—possibly in some other country—engage the mark in a conversation about matters that are none of his or her business, solely for the purpose of manipulation.

It’s another reason we should protect our privacy and draw a line where information that belongs to us is concerned.

Remember: Just say no!

Yard Sale, II

VickyC ended up clearing about $700 on the Big Yard Sale Adventure. We held the sale open again yesterday (Saturday) from about 7:00 a.m. to around 3:00 p.m., and she sold a great deal of Stuff.

We also ended up having a lot more fun yesterday, because we met a whole bunch of interesting people. On Saturday folks have time to stop and chat.

yardsaleThe sorta-gentrifying neighborhood of shotgun houses and 1920s bungalows where VickyC lives is extremely diverse, populated not only by wanna-be Yuppies, penniless now but one day to be affluent, but also by many Mexican immigrants who communicate through their English-speaking young children. A Sikh temple is a-building down the street, and so quite a few Sikhs live in the neighborhood—an interesting and friendly set. Then, for reasons unknown, a LOT of urban Indians dwell in the area, most of them Navajo or at least identifying with the Navajo nation. A number of impoverished artists also live nearby. All of these people love to shop in yard sales.

An appealing teenaged boy came by in his Sikh robes, two dollars to his name. He bought a few things and coveted—ooohhh how he coveted!—the bass guitar and huge amp that VickyC’s boyfriend had contributed to the event. Of course, the $550 asking price was out of the question. He left his phone number and asked VickyC to ask the boyfriend to call to discuss. This, as it developed, was serendipitous.

The young parents from across the street dropped by with their 15-month-old baby. Dad is fully engaged in neighborhood politics. He stopped to discuss his scheme to create a newsletter that he hoped would be free of the acrimony that has developed over the years as the result of resistance to an old-timer who wants everything his way (so we were told). In the course of a long conversation, we learned a lot about the neighborhood activists, the demographics, and the City’s machinations for and against the large area included in the neighborhood association’s territory.

canyondechellyA Navajo couple dropped by with their young teenaged daughter. They, to tell the truth, were slumming, Sunday driving on a Saturday afternoon by yard-saling through a part of the urb that they considered shaky enough to be dangerous.They lived in Chandler, where they had set up household so they could send their kids through good public schools, in the absence of the same on the Res. Very mainstream middle-class in appearance, they attributed the quality of the school system and the paucity of commerce on the Res to the entanglements of many overlapping layers of government bureaucracy and observed that both of their children were doing exceptionally well in the Chandler schools. They did, however, say they probably will retire to the Res after the kids grow up.

The high point of the day was a 40ish Navajo woman who befriended us with a great deal of chatter and much shopping. She loved VickyC’s mom’s taste in clothes, and she selected about $60 worth of stuff (at a buck apiece). In the course of time, she told us a great deal about herself and her life, talking much more than one expects from Southwestern Native Americans, who tend to be quiet people. It seemed to me that something was not quite right, and eventually she revealed what it was: shortly after she had lost a five-week-old baby, she had fallen out of a moving pickup on the Res and sustained a near-fatal head injury. She survived by dint of brain surgery in a New Mexico hospital (where she had to be airlifted), but it took a year of therapy before she could speak normally and walk. She was very affable and explained to us how she would ceremonially free the clothing of the dead woman from the spirit that might remain and return her (the spirit) to her home at VickyC’s. Eventually she walked home and then returned with some ceremonial items that VickyC could use to assist with this process; she explained how to use them and what all those customs meant, she said, “in your way.”

She waited around most of the day for her husband, who was junketing with his workers, to arrive with some cash. During this time, she folded clothes and kept us company. As one might expect, he was less than thrilled with the plan to fork over $60 or $70 for used valuables. VickyC dropped the price for the mountain of clothing she’d selected to $20 and he relented.

By this time, it was getting late. VickyC announced she was closing the show and started dragging stuff out to the curb, where she intended to leave it for free. When hubby heard this, his enthusiasm rose. Now he started to make his own selections of used valuables, among which, to VickyC’s delight, was an oak entertainment center she had not unloaded. A Mexican woman was also there when the “FREE” announcement came down. She loaded up all the clothes our Navajo friend rejected, along with stacks of kitsch and old cosmetics.

I suggested VickyC call the Sikh kid, since he also coveted a number of valuables but had run out of cash. He appeared in an instant, delighted to get a Giants athletic jacket, a bunch of other baseball clothes, and various tschochkies not to be missed. (What is that kid going to do with that stuff?)

These folks virtually vacuumed the front yard! By the time we were done, all we had to do was haul the trash to the bins in the alleys and carry the tables back inside.

So, it was a great success. To celebrate, we went to dinner at one of those urban underground restaurants that no one knows anything about but everyone should. If you’re ever in Phoenix, it’s the Piccolo Cucina at the corner of Oak and Seventh Street. Don’t miss it.
🙂
hágoónee’ for now

Photos:
California Yard Sale
by S. Michael Miri

Yard sale adventures

It’s twenty after five and I’m done in…and I didn’t do much of the work.

VickyC is still trying to shovel out the mountains of clothing and other personal effects left after her mom passed last April. She’s already sold over $1,500 worth of clothing on consignment. But bags and bags of perfectly fine clothing—some of it very attractive—were rejected by the consigner. So, she decided to throw a yard sale. Another of her friends and I offered to help out and to bring some of our own yard-salable stuff to the big event.

And what a yard sale she’s got going! We convened at her central-city home right at 7:00 a.m. One of her house-mates put up the yard sale signs on his way to work, and shortly customers started to show up.

In addition to hundreds of clothing items and mountains of towels, sheets, and bedding, she offered several pieces of furniture, including a Thomasville coffee table and a handsome red upholstered love seat. I brought the security cameras M’hijito had installed to record activity in the backyard during the late great swimming pool vandalism adventures, plus some old stereo components and a few pieces of kitsch. A male friend contributed two electric guitars and an amplifier.

People will buy the darnedest things…and not buy the darnedest things. The clothing, as expected, sold well, even though there was so much of it we had no hope of hanging it up or even of spreading it out in any way to display it effectively. Buyers just pawed through stacks and bags of stuff, apparently undisturbed by the absence of merchandising flare. Someone paid $100 for one of the guitars, but no one would pay $75 for the love seat, which was clean and in nearly new condition. It took all day to unload the coffee table. Someone bought two of the stereo components, neither of which was the receiver. The cameras, hard disk, and electronic stuff to connect them to a TV set were stolen.

VickyC collected over $300 today and probably will sell more tomorrow, provided it’s not raining. Rain wasn’t predicted until Sunday, but gray clouds lowered overhead all day and it wouldn’t be surprising if we got rain by tomorrow.I collected $21 and change, and VickyC gave me a lamp that I coveted for M’hijito’s house as consolation for the theft of the electronic goods.

Staging this yard sale was an enormous amount of work, especially for the proprietor. We hangers-on didn’t do much, other than help drag a few tables around and spread out the loot, and then drag it all back into a secure area when VickyC was ready to close for the afternoon. Was it worth it?

Really: is a yard sale worth the amount of work it requires?

Only, IMHO, if you have a lot of stuff to get rid of and you can be pretty certain it’s the sort of stuff that will sell. Around here, that means clothing, children’s toys, tools, low-end cookware, and (sometimes) small household items. And by a lot, I mean a lot:a houseful of stuff left by a deceased relative, or everything you own when you decide to not to rent a truck or pay a moving company to decamp to another state.

Given the time and effort it takes to put together even a fairly small yard sale, I don’t think it’s worth the effort unless you can make at least $300. We held the sale open from 7 in the morning till around 2:00 p.m.—seven hours—and VickyC had put in many, many hours more than that. I’d estimate she put in at least 20 hours, bare minimum. That meant she earned about $15 an hour, not a bad wage.

In my case, however, if you count VickyC’s $15 asking price for the lamp as a fair trade for the $800 worth of security camera equipment that was ripped off (I hoped to get about $30 for the stuff, at yard-sale rates), then I came away with $36 for the seven hours of my time at the sale plus another hour spent gathering my junk, cleaning it up, tagging it, and hauling it downtown. That’s $4.50 an hour…a far cry from the $60 an hour my time commands on the freelance market.

So, no: in ordinary circumstances, I doubt if yard-saling is worth your time. Financially, I would have been better off to have spent today marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk or writing the proposed CE Desk book. Had I donated my junk to Goodwill, the deduction from my income taxes would have been worth more than my yard-sale proceeds. It was a choice people-watching opportunity, and I enjoyed spending the time with my friend. But beyond that, I don’t see it as a particularly efficient way to generate sidestream income.