Straggling buyers crept back, long after the "thrift" sale was over — another ramification of Clutter Rat Disease

©2017 Peter Free

 

04 July 2017

 

 

Caveat

 

I continue to write in an annoyed state.

 

Beware. No teddy bears here. Although there is a subtle dose a paradoxical self-deprecation.

 

 

I may as well be from the far side of Pluto in my failure to appreciate human behavior, much of the time

 

Recently, I mentioned dealing with Clutter Rats and the spiritual annoyances associated with that fatal psychic condition.

 

Part of the earlier blurb addressed a "thrift" sale intended to dispose of many of a passed-on Hoard Rat's estate.

 

 

A thrift sale is a "yard" or "garage" sale someplace else.

 

 

Predictably, long-lingering folk meandered through the mostly uninteresting items, literally spending hours blabbing before parting with their quarter or two.

 

 

A quarter is an American coin of almost no value. They are more useful when filled into a sock and used as a self-defensive bludgeon.

 

 

Two days — on a very tight 9-day schedule to empty, renovate and sell the house (presumably now emptied of its clutter) — expired in this fashion.  The people-in-charge had managed to trade incoming pennies against the many thousands of dollars in the home's diminishing value as the real estate season withered with each passing summer day.

 

My irritation about backwards prioritization and absent planning ballooned. In part because the male pair of us were:

 

 

doing the heavy lifting,

 

long-distance carrying

 

(necessitated by the lunatic retirement complex's architectural design and landscaping)

 

and

 

had been designated to do the coming renovations in that sadly treated house.

 

 

The garage sale just meant wasted time and senselessly more repetitive hoisting to and fro.

 

 

The stake through the heart came when . . .

 

More than a day after the futile sale event ended, straggler buyers returned to the now empty driveway.

 

Knock, knock?

 

 

"It's Michelle, is anyone here?

 

"Do you still have (such and so)?

 

"Is it still $5?

 

"Oh, I see it. There it is!

 

"The one underneath that stack of furniture behind all those other piles of furniture."

 

 

Then Elaine showed up. She had spent literally hours chatting at the thrift sale during its two-day span.

 

 

"I really wanted that little blue vase. (Gesturing to show an 8-centimer object.)

 

"You know the one for fifty cents.

 

"It's blue and white." (She says, smiling with object-lust.)

 

 

The vase that she wants (if I remember it correctly) is, of course, now paper-wrapped and buried somewhere inside an unknown one of four or five large moving boxes that I had packed up (long after the sale ended) to donate to a church charity.

 

 

Sure Elaine, I'll waste more valuable time unburying everything that it took many minutes to wrap in the first place — just to find that sub-dollar item you were too cheap and indecisive to buy two days ago, while you blathered persistently off-topic, instead of concentrating on why you were here and what you wanted to get.

 

 

The moral? — Clutter Rat Disease will kill you, even when you think you've managed to escape its rabies-eyed clutches

 

The clingers are everywhere, soiling sanity and magnificent skies.

 

Ommmmm.

 

 

Incidentally, if we want to investigate why democracy is an impossibly ineffective way to govern, we need look no further. Human mentality (generally) is unsuited to anything that requires a combination of predictive intelligence, sensible planning and others-aware self-control.