Garage Sale Nightmare!

Well, the girls have seemed to adjust to sharing a room and Ely hasn't seemed to be bothered we took away her crib and room. She's even done great considering she has a cold right now. It has been a very busy week with up to an hour of training several nights this week and up to 2-3 hours each night preparing for this weekend's garage sale.

We weren't scheduled to start our sale till Friday late afternoon when I had someone there to help me. However, I forgot I shouldn't open the garage door to take out the trash and people started to flood in. I at first thought, I'll do this for a 1/2 hour and then shut the door again. Then, I heard the forecast was calling for thunderstorms possibly later that day and all day Saturday. So, by myself, with two kids, I managed a garage sale until reinforcements arrived 4 1/2 hours later.

That wasn't what was bad though (although it was very tiring and stressful). An elderly guy arrives in a handicap van he drives himself and comes out of it in a motorized wheelchair. Since he is handicapped, he asks me, "What's that? OH, can you put that aside for me. Oh, that's nice, add that to my pile, please..." He also would snap at other customers, "That's mine, I just bought that-put that back down!" So, after a while, he has a huge pile formed ($55.00 worth of stuff). He tells me to keep it aside, he'll be back that afternoon. True to his word, he did come back that afternoon, starts up a whole separate tab and huge pile of stuff. All along, he's bickering with every price, trying to talk us down. Keeping track of the tab soon got confusing as we discovered that our calculator timed out after awhile. Anyway, his total came to 260 something. He says he only has 150 and needs to go get more money. He does come back and gives us more money, buys more stuff and is ready to load. Nate arrives home from work soon and kindly offers to haul stuff to his house in his truck for him. Nate had to bring 2 separate loads of stuff. After the 2nd load, this guy starts to bicker about the final sale price. Turns out, he wanted $5 more dollars. Nate kindly gave him $5 more dollars, despite the fact that he hauled all the stuff for free for him. 3 hours later, this man arrives once again in our driveway. He claimed that he bought a nice container from us (which I recalled) and that it was filled with Crystal. He did buy most of the crystal we were selling. He says he can't find it at his house and thought we forgot to load it or something. There wasn't anything of the sort left in our garage and he starts bickering once again about his horrible loss. He said he would come back the next day to figure it out and get it settled. I was in tears by this point from stress and Nate didn't sleep a wink all night wondering when he would come back and what we should do with him.

This is a warning to all of our Rochester friends, if you see this guy arrive at your garage sale. Either he has mental issues, or is a scammer. On a positive note, we did make some descent money from him. Just don't want to ever in my life see him again!