I have a love/hate relationship with Craigslist. I live in a low population density area where the relatively close-by Craigslist deals are few and far between. The "big city" Craigslist is hardly worth looking at, since I will have next-to-no-chance of getting there first 99% of the time. It is normally psyche-damaging to even look at what is/was available there that I have no chance of getting. Yesterday was an exceptional exception.
Checked Craigslist before getting down to work yesterday morning and was dismayed to see that THIS ad had been placed the middle of the afternoon (the day before): http://www.antiqueauto.org/assets/pZ-1pKitCraigslist.png No phone number in the ad (thankfully) so I hit the email and asked him to please consider it "sold" to me (if it was still available). I explained that I lived hours away, but had a sister/bro-in-law in his town that would do the transaction for me (or so I *hoped*). Then I dashed off a plea for help in getting there first to my sister & bro-in-law (not knowing if it had already been sold, which I strongly suspected it probably had been). Complicating matters further was the fact that I would not be in the office (at my email/phone) as I would be busy on a remote video shoot for my employer for the entire morning. Working in my favor, for the first time, was my 3G iPad 2. During a mid-morning break I was able to use it to check my work email (remotely). First, the seller had responded and said that it was indeed still available but that he also had another guy interested. He gave me both his address and phone number, so I immediately called him. I assured him that I was definitely purchasing it and that I just had to figure out who was getting it and what time would work for all concerned. The seller was home all day, so that was a big plus. I implored him to consider it sold to me and found out that he had not given his phone number or address to the other guy (at least not yet). My brother-in-law, who worked in the same quadrant of the city, was kind enough to do the transaction for me over his lunch break. The seller confirmed with me via email that he had indeed made the purchase (only later confirmed by my BIL). And there was Great Rejoicing. I plan on selling the body and two lenses to both reimburse my brother-in-law and buy him a nice restaurant gift certificate for he and my sister for making it all possible. The "free" F 100mm f2.8 macro goes in the bag. It will be my first Pentax macro longer than 50mm and also my first AF macro lens. Looking forward to doing some PESOs with it. People seem to really like that lens (and it's brethren). So my iPad 2 basically just paid for itself by facilitating that one purchase (although a smart phone would have allowed something similar, if I had opted for a smartphone instead). -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
