Craigslist is one of the strangest ways to do anything, I’ve gotten a few good deals buying stuff but had nothing but nightmares getting rid of stuff.

That first guy is one of the reasons I don’t eBay as much as I used to. So many nutters.

I sold an absolutely mint condition Macbook Pro 15″ (2009 model) to a guy on Amazon, and to this day, the guy STILL sends me emails through Amazon’s “contact seller” links, complaining about the machine. I spent over an hour in long distance phone calls with this guy before he agreed to click the “buy” option, because he claimed he was scammed last time he tried to buy one on eBay, and was really nervous about it. (Fine… I understood that. So we went over every last detail of my machine; what all the specs were, any small scuffs or scratches I could see on the bottom of the case, etc. etc.) Well, a week or two after he gets it, he’s asking me about 2 or 3 pages of problems he claimed he was having with it including freezes/crashes, a “cloudy looking screen”, keyboard keys he said were slightly slanted or crooked, and some issue about it taking several seconds to switch audio over when he plugged in a headphone jack. I did my best to suggest some things to try or check — and he disappeared for a while. (Thankfully, long enough so Amazon would no longer allow him to demand a refund from me.) But he randomly writes me, insisting I sold him a machine assembled out of untested spare parts, and other nonsense. He’s just psycho!

And eBay? Ugh.. Last time I sold a lousy mini DVI to DVI adapter cable on there, the guy buying it won it for about $5 — and then demanded a refund because I described it improperly. (I accidentally typed mini-displayport instead of mini-DVI in my description, yet the photo I included let you clearly see which cable it was.) Technically, yeah, I screwed up … but come on! He could just resell the thing (likely at a profit) to someone else locally rather than go through shipping it back for $5! I wound up losing the money I spent to ship it to him, and had to hope he was even going to really return it to me after I refunded him. (He finally did – but took his sweet time mailing it back.) Experiences like that make me inclined not to bother with it anymore.