So I posted an ad on Craigslist:

iPad 16G + Wifi + AT&T 3G with bonus leather case – $400

With pictures and descriptions and trying to put together a good reason why people should give me $400, et cetera. A surprising number of people contacted me almost immediately, and a surprising number of people somehow assumed a “2″ after “iPad”, including the guy who actually met me at a Starbucks and suddenly came to the realization that it’s not what he thought it was. That was embarrassing for both of us, but at least he had the comfort of walking away with four hundred dollars.

After that, I added an image next to the ipad images:

But it didn’t prevent this text conversation with a prospective buyer an hour after I posted it. Bold is his, italics mine:

: Ipad?

Yeah, just that. So:

: Ipad.

: Is to be reading image in ad which clearly answers that question

Somehow that was the conversation killer.

But I expect stupid; what really surprised me were the number of scam attempts I got. I mean, Craigslist warns about this plenty, but I was never exposed to it, possibly because I’d never tried selling anything on Craiglist over $200. One guy was, I dunno, he actually lives in Wisconsin! But he’s here until tomorrow morning and flying back from O’hare! And he really wants to see it right now but I need to bring it down to his friend’s house near the intersection of Shady and Scary in the next hour! If I don’t have a car he’d be glad to pay cab fare!

Another one, well…

: U still have the ipad forsale??

: Can u call or ...cause i am trying to make purchase right now.

I know it’s Christmas Eve and someone might be in a hurry for present reasons, but. I learned a long time ago that being pressured into fast money transactions doesn’t generally go well for me.

: On a phone call, can't right now, sorry

: Ok well ill jus buy someone elses thanx

I figure a guy in so much of a hurry that he has to go on to the next ad RIGHT NOW probably doesn’t really need to take the time to text a snarky reply, so. He probably was hoping I’d return with Sorry! I’ll bring it over right now if you’ll pay for my cab fare to the intersection of Creepy and Stabby! I mentally wished him well, since I didn’t want to spend a dime on the text message to do so directly.

But the most interesting was this one:

: iPad 16G + Wifi + AT&T 3G with bonus leather case - $400 What is your best offer?

: Good to read from you and i believe we can continue on this transaction because i don't like to beat around the bush and am not here for games, I am buying this item for my spouse located Colorado but on association and institution drive oversea i will be responsible for the shipping and handling cost, meanwhile i will offer you $640 USD, let me know if you are okay with my offer. Regards

Whoa, what? I mean, okay, obviously something scammy. Not only does Craigslist go through a lot of trouble telling you that a request to ship stuff is probably a scam, but I can’t imagine what Google Translate knockoff gave them “on association and institution drive oversea”. (Best I could guess, he meant he was on an overseas business retreat, maybe?) But the part I was really curious about…

: You're offering 640 for something I listed at 400?

: Yeah....just cover up the shipping and handling fees including tax and insurance if you think it's too much as i am not familiar with the USPS/EMS shipping issue you can just make the calculation your self let me know if you would be able to do that please get back to me

Okay, so the $640 is just the hook to make me greedy enough to not think about it too much. Greedy enough not to wonder why a guy overseas just for a business trip would think shipping an iPad costs over two hundred dollars.

Craigslist also says quite a lot about not trusting anyone who says they’ll send a money order or wire money or whatever. So I was curious further.

: And how would you send payment?

: Okay...Am gonna make the payment upfront kindly get back to me with your paypal verified email address so that i can arrange for the payment

Huh, Paypal. Interesting angle. I bet people probably inherently trust that receiving Paypal money is as good as getting money in the bank, but I’ve heard some stories about Paypal being really irritating lately.

I did a little research around the web, and came to the conclusion that what these scammers do is actually transfer the money, but after you send the item, they complain to Paypal that they never received it. It seems like Paypal generally just refunds the money, takes it back from the seller, ignores all seller protests to the contrary, and calls it a day. So if I were to actually fall into this, I’d get the $640, send the ipad, and then probably be forced into giving the $640 back in a week (either through my Paypal balance or my required-to-be-linked bank account).

Okay, so. I’m curious again…but this time I’m wondering how far I can push this.

: It turns out the USPS/EMS issue to Colorado is higher due to interstate shipping tarriffs, I need $980 USD (only)

He doesn’t reply until the next day. It was late, though I don’t know what time zone he was in. The texts were coming from a 213 number, but who knows where he actually was. Anyway, I got up the next morning, and there’s this message waiting:

: No.. you are shipping it to my friend in Africa and i will pay you that amount just get back to me with your paypal verified email address so that i can make payment asap

Man, this was less than 12 hours later and he already got his stories mixed up. Sloppy.

: Congrats on your wife's recent trip to africa. Owing to export tarriffs to africa that means it'll cost $1328.95

: Okay kindly get back to me with your paypal money request to my email at victormeires@gmaill.com

sk0re! Over three times my asking price! Okay, let’s seal the deal.

: Okay I will do that directly thank you for not beating around bushes and happy holidays to you and your wives in africa and colorado

Then I wait a half hour, ostensibly setting that up, but wouldn’t you know I hit a snag.

: Oh no... Owing to Paypal tarriffs and fees, the price for the 16G/3G ipad 1 would be $1548.63 USD only. Do you accept (Y/N)

: ok...keep me posted

Heh, much shorter response, this time. Maybe he’s all “Come on, you stupid fat American, send money already.”

At this point I’m almost actually wondering. What if I sent him a money request? Not that I would plan to keep the money, obviously — I’m just curious if I’d actually get a $1548.63 deposit in my Paypal account. But 1) I don’t know if Paypal sucks so hard that even if I returned the money right away, they’d have some way of making it unpleasant for me, and 2) for all I know the scam’s somewhere I can’t see, like maybe just the fact that he gets my Paypal-verified email address gives him something.

Still. I’d pretty much run out the escalating price path. If he said okay to $1500, he’d say okay to $650,000, so there’s no point taking that further. What else could I do?

At some point while all this was going on, I thought, hm this is costing me a couple bucks in texting fees, but it’s worth it for the entertainment. And as I was trying to work out next steps, I thought, how could you reverse a scam? Not like I’m Oceans 11 over here, but just a guy with a cellphone, in what way could I scam a scammer?

Then, oh, both thoughts at once gave me an idea.

: Thank you I have spent $3 in texting charges organizing this transaction, if you are agreeable I would like to send you a request for that amount as a sign of good faith that you are a trustworthy person, thank you and god bless

: Okay...let me know as soon as you send it

So that would be pretty awesome if that worked. Not only would I recoup my costs, but $3 would likely be under Paypal’s resource threshhold, and I’d have a great story. But I was worried…like I said, maybe the scam’s somewhere out of my view, and just the act of engaging him via Paypal at all puts me in harm’s way.

So I sleep on it, and the next morning I decide I gotta see this through. I go to Paypal and write up a carefully worded money request. Not “carefully worded” in any sense like protecting me from legal/TOU issues, but…well, with the assumption that if some grumpy Paypal agent is reading the transaction in the near future, I want it as clear as possible that I’m not receiving money for something that I was supposed to do in the future, I’m collecting money for something that happened in the past.

Even so, I stared at that and worried for ten minutes. No matter how well I worded it, some angry, indifferent Paypal dude could still zap me somehow. And I still might have been missing something. But I decided to wing it anyway. Just to be safe, I changed my password to a crazy-hard 19-character digital mess, and sent it off.

No response for much of the day, but finally about 8 hours later (hey, maybe I just figured out what timezone he’s in, come to think of it), I got this somewhat agitated response.

: WHAT THE HELL DID YOU SEND ME TO PAY FOR YOUR TEXTING AM GETTING CRAZY IT SEEMS YOU MAD OKAY

Whew. Okay that’s worlds better than “ha ha, fat Yankee dog, I now empty your bank account”. Or my bank sending me a letter saying “Dear Mr. Yankee Dog, you are now legally required to ship your house to Chechnya.”

I replied back saying “hey, you agreed, please owing to transaction and etc., god bless and regards” but that was the last I heard from him. I guess I was lucky enough to exactly hit his $1548.63 limit for my $400 ipad, but I got greedy. That extra three bucks was just too much of a risk for him and I was so close.

Had his subconscious been correct, he would’ve joined it in its mild irritation.

That form of bluster rarely seemed appropriate — “hey, do this RIGHT NOW, Citywe’rein!” — especially as now, when the command was issued from the front window of a storefront gymlet, down a side street of a side street, hardly able to make its demands known by people a hundred yards away, let alone the entire population of a major metropolitan city. As it was, however, the experience just left him amused at what effect reading a good book will have on the way he thinks. 

I appreciate the concern and appreciation of those of you who had written things here. Thanks. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last few months thinking about…oh, the point of it all, I guess. Creatively I think I’ve historically been driven by a need to be heard, to be appreciated, and to get an audience; but I’m coming around to the question, do I really need to? And I’m kinda thinking no. Which for me, in terms of the typical turmoil in my head, is a good thing, because the turmoil’s been pretty calm lately, and I’m thinking of my life less as stresses I create to force myself in certain directions, and more as taking myself in directions because I feel like it.

So I really feel like I let myself down, as far as SpinnWebe is concerned — for a while I had a pretty good audience, and if I had more tenacity I probably could’ve held on to it. So when I think about A1AAA or AV1D or any other number of projects I half-started or barely started or didn’t start, it generally makes me feel guilty, but I still don’t get it done. So I’m trying to shift to not feeling guilty about it anymore. Kinda sucks for those of you who want to see those things happen, but really this is a major step towards happiness for me.

Though having said that, I drew about five Scribs tonight so I can try to get that last arc finished, at least. And I’ve been thinking more frequently about getting back to the podcast, though I’m requiring myself to think of a way to make it actually interesting first. But I’m letting that come to me on its own terms, no pressure.

And the memory. Always the memory. I’d like to write more but my brain can’t support it. I was in a mood to write a week ago, but as I’m walking from the bathroom to the kitchen, five different ideas fly through my head, with no warning or notice and no tracks left in their passing. Maybe I have to learn how to write things down quickly in outline or something…but by the time I think of that it’s probably too late.

So, Scribs, yeah. I need to get something together that creates an interactive audience. I hoped Scribs would do that, but it didn’t, at least not at the level of effort I’m willing to sustain. I think i have more chance with that with a podcast, but my first attempt had a fairly predictable downward spiral into navel gazing. But the benefit of talking my thoughts is that I can nearly talk at the speed of my thoughts, so there’s a more fulfilling feeling that what you hear is roughly what’s actually happening in my head. I think I had to do ten right next to each other to get out a lot of daily this-n-that that clogs up my skull. Either I’m taking a rest and I’ll do more of that, or I’m taking a rest and I’ll work out a more interesting format, or I’m taking a rest and won’t do a goddamn thing. Not sure yet.

In any case the point is, Scribs is done for now, again. Except for this last arc I have to finish and put up. But I’m going to let the domain name expire at the end of the month and move the archive to SpinnWebe. Not even sure if the templates will work properly in that context; hopefully the archive will still be available without needing too much work.

Fun detail, though — doc said my bronchitis could be caused by two different types of bacteria: one that tends to affect younger people, and one that tends to affect older people. He said each has its own treatment, and he gave me the old guy meds. I’m kinda of split mind on whether I want them to work.

So I got the prescription and took it to the drugstore, and they had to look a bit for my account details — because apparently I haven’t been there in the last five years, and they had old address and phone number info that I had to dig around in my brain for. (Seriously, I just don’t need doctors much.) Got those, taking them, hopefully getting better.

But it reminds me why I don’t like taking medicine. It’s just the way it changes you. That kind of powerful chemistry gets in your body and it has to knock some shit over. Like, I took a nap earlier and suddenly woke up with serious stomach acid. I tend towards acidity, but if the inside of my stomach was painted, it’d be peeling. And I feel like my heart flutters a bit every now and then.

Also, the rancid farting.

I have a pretty good sense of how my body acts, and feels, and is. So when it’s off like this, it makes me uncomfortable. Probably a good thing that I haven’t done drugs, because I’d be endlessly paranoid about the aftereffects. Ach! But right now I’d probably take the uncertainty and weirdness if this goddamn cough would finally go away.

For years and years I’ve had this idea of a comic set up in a grid format, such that you can start from the top left, and go either right or down from each panel, with the strip still making sense in whichever order you choose. I never really took a shot at it because my thought process generally went:

1) hey, that grid idea
2) whoo, tough
3) lunch

But I decided “hey, let’s stop assuming things are too hard to do before I even try them,” and then I tried it, and I came up with three of them. The first one’s okay; it was my first shot, and nothing special. But I like the next two. I have a bit of an advantage that Scribs are a bit non-sequiturish anyway, but that’s fine, I think they’re still neat.

But as I did that I was noticing a theme. Even aside from topics I said I’d revisit — my trip to England, my stint volunteering at the comics expo, et cetera — one thing that kept coming up was my saying “I’ll have to interview X on the podcast.” I’ll give myself the major triumph that was having my boss on the podcast — man did I not enjoy listening to that again — but aside from that (and the no-risk event of recording a call with my parents), I’ve had no one else on the thing.

I gotta. That’s what I have to do, both for the quality of my product and the quality of my own self. It’s the direction of the podcast that has given me The Thought — I think I’ve tapped out the interesting parts of talking into a mic by myself, and now I need to record with other people. But I just cannot bring myself to get that done. But now The Thought has gotten itself hooked into my personal pride, and if I record the next podcast without interviewing someone, my brain’s gonna call it a fail.

So all I have to do, then, is get over my fear of exposing myself to ridicule or rejection. And man have I never had luck with that. I wanted to interview Debb before her Ironman, and geez, it you want to talk about a no-risk proposition, that’s one right there, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Though partly that’s because I am also overly sensitive to being an imposition to someone, and knowing that Debb’s very shy and wouldn’t really want to talk into a microphone, that’s making it hard for me to do that as well. I had four separate opportunities to record a conversation with her and I wussed out on each one.

So I have to force myself into personal growth or decide I’m done with the podcast. Neither of those things I want to do. But if I had to pick, I’d bet the latter would be more likely.

ah, sigh. Well, though anyway here’s who I would like to interview.

- Debb: I had a separate Thought about her a few months ago. Once I realized how awesome her Ironman training was, I was pretty much locked in to interviewing her at some point.
- Toby: friend in the UK, but behing six timezones away has made organizing that difficult. Which is a shame, because I’m pretty sure we could just straight banter for a half hour and make it fun.
- Steve: coworker from years back, sounded into the idea of recording, said he’d call me when he has some spare time to do so. But he hasn’t called me back, and with my irrational fear of being an imposition, I’m not able to follow up.
- Other Steve: coworker who quit from my current job, who is drastically extroverted, so I’d be fascinated to try to get his perspective on what that’s like. He called me yesterday out of the blue, which was nice, but it was just because he wanted tech help, which was not. I may tell him the price of my help is letting me interview him.
- Brian: a SpinnWebe fan and one of the few people who actually left a voicemail on the KBA line. I’ve generally been weird with talking to fans, and now even moreso because I don’t feel like I deserve any.
- Ricardo: This would be a tough one. Guy at work who I talk to a bit, he’s clearly funny. In fact he originally came to Chicago in order to try to get into the comedy scene. But we’re only a little farther along than “hey howzit goin’” hallway greetings, so asking him to do that would be really weird. But a major win for me.
- Jim Brownfield – Now that would also be tricky. He’s a libertarian who’s on my Facebook, and we generally don’t agree about the Way Things Work. So if he had the tolerance for it I would like to have a political/sociology discussion with him, but I am really only confident doing that kind of thing in text, because when I do it realtime I am in way too much danger of trying to come off sounding like I’m the Voice of Wisdom when in fact I am just talking out my ass. But that could possibly be interesting.
- My bastard friends: Hey I actually directly asked a few of them which is cool. Usually I will just throw the idea out there and hope someone offers–oh hey actually come to think of it I was doing that for months already. Well I finally ased, and I got a few lukewarm responses, I think because we’ve been talking in text for so long that talking voice could be kinda weird. Which could just be my brain being paranoid again, but in any case it’s also decided that they’re not that into it and asking again will be another imposition. Soooo dunno. We’ll see.

Not a bad list and worth a lot of material, I’m sure. Now all I have to do is become an entirely different person.

Anyway, Schrödinger’s Cat is back. If you find that a bit interesting or not at all, there it is. If you find that a lot interesting, then there’s something extra there for you.