I can't get over my Freecycle paranoia, which is why I have stopped using it. On more than one occasion, after giving out my address, the interested party was no longer interested. Totally creepy, no?

Anyone believing an ad on Craigslist, or any other website, is the perfect opportunity to get things to refurnish their own house or sell on EBay need to think again if they are in Texas. The law in Texas allows property owners to use deadly force to prevent illegal or unwarranted loss of their property. This means, if you are caught in the act of taking property out of someone's home in Texas and you do not have their permission to do so, you stand a very good chance of being shot. So before you take advantage of what may very well be a bogus internet advertisement and start taking things that don't belong to you be absolutely sure it's worth it, because failure to do so may very well cost you your life.

They have been in the news for this stuff a lot lately. Probably a sympton of size, but maybe of the dumbing down of America?

@scottyb, thank you, I needed that laugh! Maybe I should just post the chapter here. People will parse it and fact check it for free.

Just this weekend my spouse and I used Craigslist to give away a sofa bed. Normally if we have a bulky surplus item we hope someone can reuse we just haul it out to the curb with a big sign that says "Free." With all the snow we've had this winter, however, there hasn't been much of a curb. No local charity wanted our "junk" (though one offered to take it for a sizable fee), and while the municipality would take it away as garbage, we didn't feel wholly good about that route. It was a perfectly good sofa bed, after all, we'd just replaced it with a sofa that better fit our needs. So after dismantling the sofa bed as per instructions from the solid waste management department of our municipality we decided to find street parking and haul the thing into our driveway with our customary "free" sign. Given how hard it was to see between the snowbanks we decided to goose our chances of a hasty pick up by listing it on Craiglist. We traded email with a couple of interested parties and at some point went out to do stuff. At which point my spouse started to wonder if maybe we had sent a message that indicated that our house might have been left empty ("no need to ring the bell..."). Long story short the sofa bed was gone when we rushed back home, and everything else was just fine. We laughed about our Craigslist paranoia, and then I saw this headline...

I can't remember the going rate for grammar nerds, but I think you get a discount if you advertise for "grammer" nerds instead.

That just makes them more willing to correct you for free.

Put "free" on it and some people just lose their freakin minds. I put a busted jacuzzi cover on the curb for the trash people to pick up (and I paid extra for the pick up). Someone took that sucker in less than half an hour.

Trashing someone's home is crazy but believable.

By the way, are any of the grammar nerds available for free lance editing and proofing? I will need one in the near future.

How much does it cost to rent a grammar nerd here, anyway?

irregardless' story touches on the real matter at hand here, I think.

It's not that people believe what they read on the internet. It's that some people are greedy enough to take advantage of an easy haul. You'd have to assume that more than just you had read the ad. That means a probable mob of people. Anonymity in a crowd is emboldening (as is anonymity on internet message boards, but that's a topic for a different conversation). Also, that "such and such a time" was probably chosen for the unlikelyhood of the true owner being around. Likelihood of being caught? Dropping considerably. And because people love to have a good excuse ready, they print out the ad just in case someone shows up and questions their actions. It's flimsy, but some people would feel it affords them decent protection to feign ignorance.

It all comes down to the ad generating a situation for folks to feel reasonably certain that they can break the rules and be the greedy bastards they want to be without getting caught.

The Internet, a forum of communication. The people on it -- mostly honest, sometimes idiots. The craigslist ad? TGTBT.

What's the moral of this story? Free horses don't exist.

This is probably all my fault -- about a year and a half ago I was closing down a political office full of junky, used furniture (I'd already given local nonprofits first pickins), so I ran a Craigslist ad saying,

COME AND GET IT! Such and such a time, such and such a day...

Well, the (unnamed) campaign I'd been working on (in some unidentified state)was rather well known, and some intrepid reporter with a local TV affiliate (perhaps looking for a free armoire) came across my ad and told his editor, who promptly sent out a truck to interview me (slow news day). The story ran at 6 and 10:

CAMPAIGN GIVING AWAY FREE STUFF

The next morning I biked to HQ bright and early, hours ahead of the start time for this freebie extravaganza, but much to my horror cars were already backed up a full half mile on the frontage road, rush hour traffic was hopelessly snarled, and the free crappy furniture-seeking citizens of Our Fair City were fully adrenalized.

So I gave my small staff careful instructions -- on my signal, open the doors ONLY to the big storage room, do NOT allow anyone into our actual offices, where we still had computers, printers, and such still in service. My man on the big loading dock doors THOUGHT he heard my signal, threw open the doors before my door guarders were in place, and the most chaotic and hilarious swirl of mad greed I've ever seen in my life ensued.

I immediately realized what had happened, and I flew through the building and somehow quelled the uprising (thankfully I was in good shape), but I remember running by one ten year old kid and hollering, "Son, put down that frying pan!"

I herded everyone back into the storage room, where they cleared the place of a huge amount of furniture right to the walls within an hour. I had to pull one guy off the ceiling who was trying to rip down the duct work. Two other folks wrestled over the most disgusting couch you've ever seen, broke it in half, but yet another guy took it anyway. Two love seats, I suppose.

Perhaps in some alternative Craigslist universe this legend of free in an ain't no free world has spread, and to all those whose houses have been stripped to the 2x4s, I apologize.