How to lose friends and piss people off

My vacation photos are being held hostage on my daughter's laptop...

I will instead regale you with a tale from my recent garage sale.

A rather pushy, obnoxious woman arrived at my home mid-sale and made sure to tell me, before she began browsing, that she worked at a local antiques mall and she was a BUSINESS WOMAN. Now, I've had these folks stop at every sale I've ever had. They are sharks in bloody water, circling, circling, waiting for a deal. They will buy something from you for $5 and sell it for $50. THEY ARE PROFESSIONALS.

Side note: Last year I had one of these professionals come to my sale 20 minutes after I opened and try to bargin me down on prices. I believe I told them that they could come back at the end of the sale. Either that or I told them to go to hell. Both scenerios are equally plausible.

Anyway, this was a fundraising sale for Charitable Crafters and by no means were any of the prices too high. My main goal when I have these sales each year is to get rid of stuff. I usually sell the acrylic yarn for .25 cents a skein and the fancier yarns are put in ziplocks and priced at between 25%-50% of what they would sell in the store. People who shop at yarn stores know that the prices are good and they buy them. People that bitch about the prices generally have never purchased their yarn anywhere but Wal-Mart and are absolutely clueless. Or, they are conniving bitches who exist on this planet just to piss me off.

MS. PROFESSIONAL, while discussing loudly how everyone at her antiques place are rotten business people who don't care and are lazy and awful to work with, shopped around and ended up bringing her purchases to me. Well, I'll be! She handed me a skein of fancy yarn that had no business being in the .25 cent bin. As a matter of fact, I remembered putting it with a similar skein and pricing them at $7.00 for two. Since they sold for $9.00 each in the yarn shop and they were both brand new, I didn't think this was unreasonable. I looked at the skein and then I looked at MS. PROFESSIONAL.

"That's strange," I told her. "This wasn't in the .25 cent bin."
She looked mildly uncomfortable and then said "Well, I took it out of the ziplock bag that it was in because I'm not paying THAT price."

Now, here is where I wished I didn't have four people lined up behind her because I was annoyed by this woman the very minute she stepped onto my property. I wanted to be just as loud and obnoxious as she was and I wanted to ask her "Does that mean I can come to your business and switch the tags out if I don't want to pay YOUR price?"

Instead, I just handed it back to her and said "I don't so..."

"Well, I don't want it then..." she stomped back and threw it onto the table where the ziplock bags were and left.

Yeah, here's an observation. If you think EVERYONE around you has a problem and they are absolutely awful and rotten, perhaps you should instead LOOK IN THE MIRROR.