I love to wheel and deal. Unfortunately, I stink at it. My first bartering experience came at age eight, when I traded my Creature of the Black Lagoon model for a model of Frankenstein’s monster with a missing left foot. The foot had been replaced with a Popsicle stick wrapped in electrical tape.My Creature was practically new; I’d only put it together a week earlier. The Frankenstein was old and had been repainted about 30 times. That’s why I made the trade; I liked the way it smelled. (I have no idea how many brain cells I killed in those days sniffing model paint, but I’m guessing it was a lot, judging by my current mental faculties.)
It wasn’t until a day later that I realized I’d made a bad trade. The first of many.
Since then, I’ve traded good cars for bad trucks, nice American-made guitars for cheap Korean instruments that happened to have a cool blue sparkle finish, and once I even swapped an expensive pair of cowboy boots for a pair of faux alligator loafers. That one seemed pretty brainless even at the time, but I was burning with “barter fever.”
In the long, long ago, before the Internet, making a bad trade was something that happened only occasionally, at a car dealership, maybe, or a flea market. With the advent of sites like Craig’s List, the chance to make a bad trade is omnipresent.
Last week I noticed an online posting for an oak dining room set, exactly like the one The Lovely Mrs. Taylor has been wanting for the past ten years. Better still; the seller was willing to swap the set for a used laptop computer, like the one gathering dust in my closet.
I emailed the seller with details and she accepted the offer; the following Sunday, I would deliver the computer to her house and we would trade even up. She assured me the table and chairs were in “near perfect” condition.
That settled, I posted our old dining room set on Craig’s List, asking what I thought to be a fair price. Within ten minutes, I had five offers, a sure sign I had – as usual – lowballed the deal. Mrs. T had instructed me to charge more, but I wanted to make sure the old set sold before the new one arrived.
Come Sunday, I delivered our old table and chairs to the buyer. He paid full price without complaint or haggle, another sure sign I had undercharged.
Mrs. Taylor pointed out that, should we not like the new set for some reason, we would now be forced to eat dinner sitting on the floor.
“Have I ever steered us wrong?” I asked. Mrs. T remained silent, undoubtedly trying to tally the number of times I have done just that.
Her fears were put to rest when we arrived at the seller’s house. The chairs were in excellent shape, as was the table’s base. The table top itself had been carefully wrapped in plastic and foam padding, to prevent scratches. The seller offered to remove the plastic so we could inspect the table top, but since we were transporting the thing home in the back of a pickup, it seemed best to leave the padding in place.
Back home (after a 90-minute drive) I reattached the base to the table top with the bolts provided, then turned it upright. Carefully, we peeled back the plastic and foam covering, revealing a surface utterly ruined by what appears to be spilled fingernail polish remover.
This was almost a relief to me, as things had been going far too smoothly until this point and my making a good trade is one of the Seven Signs of the Apocalypse. With the tabletop’s finish thus battle scarred, the trade now fell comfortably into the category of “bad.”
Oh, it’s still a nice piece of furniture and I can refinish it to make it look new again. But still, for just a minute there, I thought I might be the one to wind up with a Creature of the Black Lagoon instead of a one-footed Frankenstein.
Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.
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