I'll try to keep it brief but this story involves the convergence of three separate events. It also highlights the growing gap in understanding between the over fifties and the younger generation, I think
1 - I've been trying to sell a mountain bike on Craigslist
2 - I've been lusting after a Salsa Fargo, the mountain bike sale will cover a nice chunk of the cost of a Fargo
3 - I'm too cheap to pay for premium movies in my cable package.
So I've had the Craigslist ad for my GT Karakoram posted for a few weeks and I've dropped the price a couple of times. Last night I'm watching some rubbish on the tube and I get an email from a guy interested in the bike. We switch from email to texts and we arrange to meet at the Walmart Super-Center in Sturgeon Bay. He's driving up from Green Bay, about a two hour round trip, and I'm driving south from Egg Harbor, about a fifty minute round trip.
He's made all the right noises and the guy can spell and put together an email, and appears to function with some degree of lucidity, so I avoid insulting him with the usual pre-screening questions I use for handling Craigslist responders, like: 'would you like me to send some money to Nigeria?', and 'are you sure you want to meat me and not meet me?'.
We set the time for 4pm and I tell him we should meet opposite the Garden center in the main parking lot, as I know that nobody parks down there in the winter.
A short time later, miraculously, out of the blue….a 2013 Fargo pops up on one of my Trader groups on Facebook. I can hardly believe my eyes. These things are like hen's teeth and I could be putting together a deal tomorrow if everything goes well with my new buddy from Craigslist.
It's Friday night, I'm drinking Earl Grey tea and eating a Cadbury's chocolate bar and flicking through thirteen channels of sh*t on the TV and life is good. It's all falling into place.
As I'm surfing through the dross I notice a movie on LMNHD that gets screened over and over and over, but I'd never even paused to consider watching it before now - The Craigslist Killer.
What the heck, why not. I never watch anything live as I can't deal with the commercial interruptions so I decide to record it and perhaps watch it in a day or two.
At 3:50 pm on Saturday I pull into the empty section of the parking lot at Walmart, directly opposite the Garden Center. There are no other cars around.
I open the trunk, whip out the bike, pop on the front wheel and lean it against the back of the car so it's fully visible.
Fifteen minutes later I'm starting to wonder where this dufuss is when I get a text from him saying 'I'm waiting outside Walmart, where are you?'.
I finally get him down to the Garden Center with the aid of some tricky directions - drive down the front of the building, follow the big sign where it says 'Garden Center'.
I see his car approach and I notice there are two guys inside and that the larger of the two can barely see over the top of the steering wheel.
The short guy gets out first and I figure he's maybe 5' tall in his stocking feet. Now bear in mind I'm 6' 4" and I'm selling an XL framed bike. So he comes ambling over with his pants hanging at half mast and has a look around the bike. "Wow, it looks brand new, cool"
"It's not for you, is it?" I ask rather cautiously. "No, it's for my friend in the car, I'm the expert so I'm checking it out for him". So then his buddy comes over, he's maybe 5' 5". I say nothing. He gets on the bike and tries to ride it around the parking lot. As I'm watching him I know what's coming next. He rolls back towards us, hits the brakes, tries to put his feet down and crushes his nuts on the top tube.
Speaking in a higher pitched voice than previous, he declares "I think it's too big for me".
Go figure, Sherlock.
So his friend huffs and puffs and mutters something incoherent and starts walking back towards the car. So I ask the guy whose eyes are still watering "Didn't you see that the frame was an XL, it was stated in both the ad title and in the description?".
"No", he replies.
"So you came all this way to look at a bike and you didn't know what size frame it had?
"I guess", he says to me nonchalantly, as if it's to be expected.
As I'm driving back north I couldn't shake off the feeling that these two muffins were just a couple of dudes who meant no harm but didn't have a brain between the pair of them. Who the hell goes off to buy a bike without knowing how big it is…it's the second piece of information one looks for after seeing the make/model of the bike, isn't it?
Anyway, I'm back home now and getting ready to sit down to watch The Craigslist Killer. It will take on an added dimension, I'm sure of it. I'm quite certain the plot will involve someone responding to an ad and not being seen again. I'm just surprised that this isn't pretty much a daily occurrence, since I almost scored a two'fer today from my first ad in weeks.
Anyone looking for a Karakoram in an XL frame, call me.