People on Craigslist Are the Least Reliable People

We're looking for a bed for my office so that it can double as a guest bedroom slash place for me to sleep when Nathan snores. It never occurred to me to look into sofa beds, but I found a few advertised on Craigslist, so I put out some feelers by email.

The pullout I liked best was fluffy & off-white & just $150, being sold by a woman only 20 minutes away from here, & one of Nathan's coworkers agreed to lend us his time & his pickup truck to transport it. I exchanged a number of pleasant, civilized, normal emails with the seller, who had a stupid email address but seemed otherwise like an OK person to do business with, & we made plans for the sofa to become mine.

This morning, I confirmed we were interested & could pick it up today after 4pm. She responded to say she was feeling under the weather but good to go:

"If you want to do today please call me  about an hour before you plan on coming.  Please RING MY PHONE OFF THE HOOK IF I DON'T ANSWER. There is a possibility I will have drifted off considering the Nyquil I am on. But don't worry about waking me, I know you've been through a lot trying to get your friends truck so I don't mind doing it today."

I told her we'd be there tonight & would be in & out quickly (TWSS) so as not to bother her too much. At 5:15pm, I called her four times, & when she finally answered, all hopped up on Nyquil or on just being an apparent weirdo, I told her we were ready to come pick up the sofa bed in the next hour.

"Oh, the problem..." she began, & my heart sank a little. Because of course there's a problem. This was a Craigslist transaction, after all. "The problem is that I'm not where the couch is. See, I already moved, so... I mean, could you come tomorrow? I just don't want to go back over to the house right now."

No, lady, I can't come tomorrow because I set it all up for today & you agreed to that & I called an hour ahead of time just like you told me to. She gave me a story about her boyfriend's job & how she never knows when he'll get out of work, but he might be able to go to the old house to wait for us until we can come get the couch, blah, blah. Obviously, I tuned out.

"Like, are you really planning to come get it?" she asked, testing me. "Because people from Craigslist never really follow through."

I politely reminded her that I'd sent her approximately half a dozen emails to signify my commitment to coming to get the couch. I politely reminded her that I'd made significant effort to coordinate timing of pickup, both with her & with our truck-owning friend. I politely reminded her that she asked me to call her one hour before I planned to come get the couch tonight.

I reminded her of all this politely, of course, though I'm sure I sounded confused & a little bit pissed off because who does that? And while I know that, as crappy/crazy Craigslist encounters go, this one doesn't even rank, I can't help but wonder why you'd bother listing something & going through the motions of making plans for someone to come pick it up from you if you can't be bothered to be there for them to pick it up from.

Flaky Couch Lady had the balls to call me at 7pm (twice!) to say she was ready for pickup, but I was (am) in my pajamas anticipating the Teen Jeopardy final (go Leonard!), so ain't nobody got time for that. I just hope Nathan doesn't snore tonight. Or any night, really, until someone on Craigslist proves better at keeping their word!