new career paths

I'm starting to wonder if my current job is really right for me.  Maybe it's just a touch of seasonal depression; it was, after all, a long winter and the commute up and down 94 has not gotten a whole lot more entertaining since last Halloween.  It's nice to see the lights on over Target Field as I make my way south on game days.  But that's a small pleasure when it's gonna be another 20-30 minutes before I get spit out, in slow motion, of the far end of the Lowry Hill Tunnel.

I know that I should have a distinctly better attitude about my work.  I should bask in the honor of serving the EnHenn community and the taxpayers.  While working for peanuts.  And while various overpaid higher-ups concoct ridiculous plans to sell me into even deeper indentured servitude.  What the hell's wrong with me?

OK, so I've got a bad attitude.  I'm not proud of it but it's set my little pea brain to working at fever pitch on coming up with some alternative ways to make the rent.  Something that's stuck in my mind (besides lunch) is a story I heard awhile back about some guy who decided to sell almost all of his possessions online.  And then, after shipping his stuff into new homes, arranging to visit the things he'd just sold and getting to know the new owners.

A few milliseconds of Google search found the story for me.  It goes all the way back to 2000 when John Freyer of Iowa City decided to sell much of his stuff on eBay.  With the help of some of his friends (I picture them as fairly well-lubricated), he put price tags on a bunch of the stuff in his apartment and started posting it for sale to the highest bidder on the Bay.  He got serious about it: registered a website to support the whole thing (allmylifeforsale.com) and ended up writing a book about it.  Coincidentally titled All My Life for Sale.

But the book came later.  He started selling the stuff he'd listed.  His first sale: his toaster.  He found that selling his possessions was changing his life.  For example, after the toaster got sent off, he stopped eating toast.  And he wondered if the buyer was eating more toast than before.  He started including a caveat in his listings' descriptions that he might want to come and visit the items after he'd sold them.

This was a book I had to own.  So I bought a copy.  Online, of course.  I should have paid full price at a local store (like Micawber's in St. Paul---go there soon and buy something) or, honoring the storyline, bought one on eBay.  But either of those routes would have cost more than finding a copy from a 3rd-party seller on Amazon for 30¢ and hitting the "Buy with 1-Click" button.  My credit card was whacked with a $4.29 charge (to include the $3.99 shipping fee) and within a week I had the book in my hands.

It's a great read.  I was a little worried about the book turning out to be some kind of Marxist rant about the emptiness of American consumerism.  Maybe that's a subtext of the book that I'm just not well-versed enough in Marxist rants to recognize.  If John Freyer's a Marxist, he's got to be one of the gentlest and funniest Marxists around.  The book is hilarious.  I had to stop reading yesterday afternoon because Miz Susan was trying to take a nap next to me and I was getting close to uncontrolled laughing.  And I was only a few pages into it.

All My Life for Sale makes for a nice companion piece to the book Material World: A Global Family Portrait which we used to sell the hell out of to unsuspecting Education Department students at Hamline.  That one is a photo essay consisting of pictures of families from all over the world, posed in front of their homes with all their possessions arranged around them.  I'm pretty sure that that's a book with some kind of a Marxist subtext but, once again, I'd be the last guy to cite as an authority on Marx or any of his isms.  I know infinitely more about Groucho Marx than Karl but I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't know all that much about him, either.

Anyway, the concept behind Freyer's AMLfS had me thinking even before the book hit our mail slot.  What if I were to come up with a variation on this theme?  I'm already "visiting" my donations to the Goodwill when I see them on the racks in the store during my weekly (or more often) shopping trips.  So, I'm sorta there already.  But I need to figure out a way to turn this to financial advantage.

I've sold a smattering of miscellaneous stuff on Amazon.  Books I got stuck with after the doorknobs from Lincoln refused to buy everything at the Hamline Bookstore. Duplicate CDs I bought because I was too stupid to remember that I already owned them.  The occasional smart buy that I've spun and made a little money on.  I've got the records of what I sold to whom.  What's to keep me from visiting the new owners (unbeknownst to them, say in the middle of the night when they're asleep or while they're on vacation) and taking back what used to be rightfully mine and then selling it again?

If I'd have been thinking ahead, I'd have saved the return addresses on the packages that have contained all the crap I've bought off of Amazon and eBay.  With that info in hand, I could visit the homes of the people who were foolish enough to sell me stuff to see if there's anything else that I want.  I mean, if I bought one thing from someone, doesn't it stand to reason that maybe they've got something else of interest to me?  In this scenario, I'd be saving money I'd otherwise spend on buying identical junk from somebody who actually wanted to sell it.  Leaving me more money to buy other stuff.  Or to hire a good criminal defense attorney.

I suppose I could start small and try boosting some of my donations off the racks at the Goodwill.  There are at least three things that seem to argue against that.  First, what would I do with the stuff after I recovered it?  About the only thing that I can think of would be to donate it again and sooner or later the IRS would get wise to my double dipping on the charitable donation deductions.  Second, if I were to get busted for shoplifting from the local Goodwill, I'm pretty sure that the cool kids down in the county jail would beat the living beejabbers out of me.  Third, and most convincing of all, is that Miz Susan would certainly not just smack me around but likely kill me if she caught me sneaking the same sorry-ass stuff back into the house that I'd just given away.