One man's trash is another man's treasure

So my old friend caffeine races to the rescue on wings of ebony...

You'll have to forgive me, I'm slightly distracted today, and all this abstract 8-bit music isn't helping. I keep getting the urge to lock all the doors, close all the curtains and play Pokemon Yellow in the dark.

Speaking of Pokemon, I was charged with the mission of selling around 7 years worth of tat at a carboot sale at school yesterday. Talk about soul-destroying! 7 years of stuffed toys and children's board games that have never seen the light of day since we moved suddenly appeared from behind a cupboard in my bedroom and were placed under the unforgiving gazes of the Dutch. Now, not to be rascist, but the Dutch are not the most generous of nations, as a quickly found out when a grizzled, 70-something year old man repeatedly attempted to persuade me to lower the price of a bass guitar I was selling from 75 euros to 40. 40! I couldn't buy half a guitar for 40 euros, and to be honest, when I finally did sell it (for 80 euros to a man whose whole appearence and character screamed "I am a bassist") I was rather pleased to be able to shake my head in faux-sympthay and say "Sorry mate, sold it"... not that he understood me.

As the day dragged on, and me and my bemused parents realised that our increasing dribble of customers were not planning on doing anything other than tut our prices (reasonable prices, might I add), people started losing the will to live and started packing up, throwing all their unsold garbage into a skip. This was all well and good... until various people decided that it was a good idea to rummage in this skip for free goodies. OK, some of the people there seemed less than wealthy, in which case, fair play to them. However, some of the scavangers were just there for the sake of getting free stuff. One woman who bought a electric piano from us was happily rummaging in there for a good half hour... someone who can afford to buy a 30 euro piano doesn't need to grab second-hand stuffed toys. I'm not sure what was more frustrating; people just rummaging in there and running off with stuff that was only priced at 1 euro to begin with, or the fact it was almost exclusively my toys they were grabbing.

Any-hoo, my dad and a couple of other stall-holders got the idea into their heads that it would be fun to start smashing and maiming all the stuff about to be dumped into the skip, therefore halting the scavanging. So the standing on technology and glassware began. The technology part was especially fun, as much of the sales (and, in one case, a return) made were cameras, PDAs and memory cards, and I was a bit frustrated that I was never able to sell any of it because my Dutch is pretty poor. The glassware was, in hindsight, a bit dangerous- one woman cut her finger on a shard of glass while trying to perloin whatever it was in the box with it, but seeing as she also wasn't without money, I have less sympathy.

I feel that there should be a point to this post... but I can't really see one at the moment. Maybe it should be about the greediness of the wealthy members of humanity or something.

Oh yes, and about the presentation I was supposed to do last week; my memory stick doesn't seem to like OpenOffice documents, and decided it would be best to neglect the fact that I had saved my presentation on it, leaving me a gibbering wreck when trying to explain my misfortune to a Head of Year. Luckily I can do it another time, huzzah!

End of post.