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Gristmill: Dumping Grounds

Wed, 12/14/2022 - 10:57
Eyeballing the furniture before bidding at a public sale in Lancaster County, Pa., in 1942.
Marjory Collins for the Farm Security Administration / Library of Congress

As Christmas gift-buying gets going full-bore, a question for the sellers on those social media marketplaces hereabouts: Can’t you maintain your morals while peddling your dubious electronics, your dark and disused furniture, your basement detritus?

I understand the utility and convenience, even pleasure, of hiding behind a keyboard and screen. Because I don’t want to discuss it either. But why, uh, misplace your essential humanity, woman in Shinnecock Hills who sold us a defective Bose multi-disc CD player and radio. 

“Does it work okay?” came the all-too-knowing question in the course of some subsequent conversation. At best it was hopeful on her part, as in, “So the problem I neglected to tell you about cleared itself up?”

Well, in a way. I couldn’t get Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” out of the thing’s slot, finally scratching the disc as I extracted it with a pair of tweezers. And then, right on cue, the CD drive spit a late-model quarter-dollar coin from its smiling hole.

I do hope the kid found a more suitable piggy bank.

Or you, Sag Harbor lawyer who sold us a hefty, mopboard-black desk enticingly outfitted with numerous nooks and crannies for a variety of storage possibilities: J’accuse! No one who’d ever sat at it could’ve failed to experience the ghostly self-opening drawer, the result of metal runners installed without the use of a level.

For a while I amused myself with a jury-rigged shiv to keep it shut, but in the end, what’s with selling damaged goods in the first place? Wouldn’t common decency dictate a warning? A discount?

Too late. The desk met the fate of any number of pieces of problem furniture — marked “FREE” in Sharpie and dumped at a grassy intersection of Noyac Road, which is now such a heavily trafficked artery for the trade parade that nothing remotely useful is ever there for more than a day. And I can feel good about recycling.

I could go on about the bad behavior on display with those marketplaces, from the annoyed “sold” designations immediately appended if you dare to hint at requiring more than a single trip to pick up quantities of superfluous construction material, to the scammers with the phony claims of pending Zelle payments. And for what? This tag-sale junk?

Yes, “I could go on,” and now I have.

 


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