The vasectomy sale.

Things you don’t often see at a garage sale: boxes of condoms. But such a good price!

Posted at 3:37 pm in iPhone |
 

33 responses to “The vasectomy sale.”

  1. coozledad said on May 8, 2009 at 4:02 pm

    If they were hoarding these for Y2K, they’re probably worthless now.
    I didn’t know people bought them by the case.

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  2. brian stouder said on May 8, 2009 at 4:07 pm

    So we covered everything from condiment questions to ‘intense sensation’ condoms today; Bravo!!

    And – what are the $0.25 gizmos near the condoms? Testers?

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  3. nancy said on May 8, 2009 at 4:10 pm

    The homeowner was selling a certain amount of what seemed to be (I devoutly hope) unopened bottles of shampoo and other personal-care products, so I’m speculating that maybe someone in the house worked for a company that sold or distributed them? At least, jeez, I hope so. I can’t imagine anyone buying such an item second-hand, and you’d think the embarrassment factor would be worth more than $8 to a sensible person.

    But you never know. I think the cylinders are toothbrush travel cases. Again: At least I hope so.

    On edit: Nope, I’m wrong. The box in front has an existing store price tag on it. So maybe it really is a vasectomy sale.

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  4. James said on May 8, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    Sheesh! Can’t some people just throw away their, uh…. personal items?

    I’ve actually been to a garage sale where people were selling used (albeit laundered) underwear. I mean… is it worth the few cents you make to give up every shred of dignity?

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  5. brian stouder said on May 8, 2009 at 4:37 pm

    James – on the other hand, there’s a whole set of expectations and unwritten rummage sale rules. For example – people always want to dicker (so to speak). Pam gets mad at me because I always say “SOLD!” when anyone makes me any offer for anything, whereas she drives a harder bargain (as seller).

    By way of saying, having utterly worthless stuff out there gives the seller the chance to say – after a buyer has driven a particularly ruthless bargain – “Here – take my undies, too!”

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  6. Dexter said on May 8, 2009 at 6:26 pm

    A co-worker approached. She said she was having a garage sale and to stop by…her neighbor had died , she was going to help the widow out by selling his wardrobe, and he had “a lot of clothes I bet would fit you.”
    Well…yes, I was a bit taken aback, but she was a good friend, and I said I’d stop by, and maybe buy a used garden hoe or something like that.
    When I got there, though, there were several tables just stacked with the deceased man’s clothes, and some racks where some suits and shirts were hanging…and everything was my exact size.
    A lot of stuff was brand new, in the packages…never opened. I am, of course, talking about Jockey Brand underwear shorts.
    Why would a man buy so much brand new stuff and then fall over dead? I guess ya never know!
    Well, I did not see any garden rakes or hoes for sale, but I also did not go home empty handed. And I did not buy any suits, shoes, socks, shirts, vests, or ties, either. 🙂

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  7. nancy said on May 8, 2009 at 7:02 pm

    Why would a man buy so much brand new stuff and then fall over dead? I guess ya never know!

    When my dad died, he found that he had paid all his magazine subscriptions forward for, like, years. We figured it was either because he assumed every renewal notice he got was a bill, and paid it, or he was maybe just feeling lucky. I took Smithsonian and my sister got the Virginia Quarterly Review.

    In my estate-sale founds, I find a lot of unopened stuff. I figure it was a gift, shopaholism or maybe senile dementia. I only get pissed when the estate-sale highway robbers try to get you to pay the full store price. Which is frequently.

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  8. Connie said on May 8, 2009 at 7:27 pm

    I used to buy my guy a package of undies every year for his Christmas stocking. A few years ago he showed me a large dresser drawer filled with unopened undies. So who knows why those unopened packages of briefs were at the estate sale.

    Which is not to imply that he doesn’t wear undies….

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  9. Linda said on May 8, 2009 at 8:22 pm

    When my dad died, he had tons of unused stuff. My favorite was blue alligator shoes (always went high end), and since they fit nobody else in the family, they were donated to the Cherry Street Mission here in Toledo. So somewhere, a street guy is wandering around with $200+ blue alligator shoes.

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  10. MichaelG said on May 8, 2009 at 10:43 pm

    Gosh, Linda, I can’t for the life of me imagine why your dad never wore those blue alligator shoes.

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  11. Sue said on May 8, 2009 at 11:49 pm

    I had a few rummage sales and found I didn’t like the customers. Pardon me for going all dijon on everyone, but the corker for me was the year I had two women knocking on my door three days before the sale wanting to go through my stuff, followed by a grim-faced woman on the day of the sale using me to teach her daughter to haggle. I don’t know who was more embarrassed, me or that poor ashamed daughter. She could barely look at me as her mom put her through her paces. I would have given her the stuff but the mom really did look like she would have smacked me for ruining the lesson. That did it. I put a “Free” sign out and went in the house, and never did it again.

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  12. MichaelG said on May 9, 2009 at 12:40 am

    I once was selling a ’67 Dodge convert for $50. It had some collision damage. This was in the late ‘70s. The dipshit asked me what kind of gas mileage I had been getting. I told him that for fifty bucks he wasn’t authorized to ask about gas mileage. He forgot to ask about the hole in the radiator. I wish I had that car back. Along with several others. I’ll bet we all have cars in memory that we’d like to have back.

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  13. Dexter said on May 9, 2009 at 1:19 am

    MichaelG: I had a 1969 Ford sedan with a leaky gas tank…went to salvage yard, had used tank installed…it leaked overnight…repeated this process two more times and every damn tank leaked.
    I went to my local beer-bar and told the bartender, my good friend, and a raging lifelong alcoholic; he offered this: “whatcha want for it?”
    I told him twenty-five dollars. Sold. He drove that car for two years , trouble free. His secret was just to never put more than $3 of gasoline in at a time, just under 4 gallons, no problem.

    I may have posted this here before, maybe not…I bought an old man’s Dodge for $200…got it home and discovered that he had been using the trunk for his damn shitty underwear…I guess he shit himself and made his way out to the car to dispose of the evidence. Damn, Sam…that was GROSS !!

    And once I was sick of a big Dodge Polara and told my drinkin’ buddy Larry he could have it for fifty bucks…he said twenty-five….sold it for $37.50.
    He NEVER touched that car…he left it in the work parking lot for three months and finally security had it towed to the junkyard, I guess.

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  14. Dexter said on May 9, 2009 at 1:25 am

    Going to Columbus in 6 hours for Mothers Day. Mother and daughter thing with me chauffeuring us around. I wanna go to Hoggy’s BBQ in Grandview but I’ll probably get shot down. I am not gonna miss my trip to Trader Joe’s, though. I love that coffee and blueberry preserves.

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  15. moe99 said on May 9, 2009 at 2:50 am

    Dexter, while you’re at TJ’s get the chocolate truffles. They are to DIE for.

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  16. Linda said on May 9, 2009 at 6:49 am

    Sue:
    Re: your early arrivals at the garage sale. I saw an ad in the Memphis Commercial Appeal for a garage sale that said: “Begins at 9 a.m. Early arrivals will be greeted with a shotgun.”

    Perhaps you just needed a firmer approach.

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  17. basset said on May 9, 2009 at 8:42 am

    My first car was a ’63 Chevy II I bought with paper-route money when I was sixteen… got it from the estate of a neighbor’s uncle or something who lived in Indiana but spent time every year in Florida. Under the front seat, I found several sets of brand-new, unopened, straight from the license branch Florida tags for it, don’t know why he never put them on.

    And it was a plain, unadorned, basic old-people car, too – rubber mats on the floor, straight shift (three on the tree!) no a/c, rollup windows, not even a radio. Can’t get ’em like that any more. I would buy a basic, nothin’-fancy small pickup tomorrow and I bet a lot of other boring old farts like me would too – maybe we’ll get our chance if Mahindra or Tata ever crack the American market.

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  18. coozledad said on May 9, 2009 at 9:10 am

    basset: I’m holding out for something that looks like a 1932 Dodge half-ton pickup.
    http://www.pickuptrucks.com/html/history/segment2.html

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  19. basset said on May 9, 2009 at 9:18 am

    I’d buy one. Meanwhile, this looks a little more likely but we’re going to have to delay gratification a bit longer…

    http://www.pickuptrucks.com/html/news/mahindra/mahindra-pickup-delayed-until-late-2009.html

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  20. moe99 said on May 9, 2009 at 10:35 am

    As I prepare to go to my son’s college graduation next week, this seemed apropos:

    http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/dear-graduate/

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  21. Rana said on May 9, 2009 at 10:42 am

    Sue, that mother was going about it the wrong way. My parents taught us to haggle by going to the swap meet (flea market) and giving us $5 to spend. My brother and I quickly developed both a distaste for the overpriced re-sale stuff (which we derided as “cellophane”) and good haggling skills. The best day was when we figured out how to tag-team someone – one of you goes and haggles, and when you get turned down, you go away for a few minutes. Then the other sibling goes and does the same thing. Basically it works because it causes the seller to second-guess their original asking price. (In this case, he should have, as it was out of line with the usual prices for toys at that swap meet.)

    So, greed + sibling competition + the pleasure of putting one over on an adult = improved haggling skills.

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  22. Danny said on May 9, 2009 at 10:54 am

    I’m not the car buff that some are, but I’ve always thought to someday own an old Chevy or Ford pickup, pre-1970.

    Now, I’ll never own a Unimog, but I’ve always liked them. Especially the fact that some models come with universal PTO (Power Take-Off) shafts that accept a number of shaft powered implements. Being a mechanical engineer, it’s hard not to geek out a bit on that sort of stuff.

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  23. basset said on May 9, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    Same for me, but it’d be a Studebaker or an International just for a little added cachet. Studebaker stopped making pickups with the 1964 model, I think IHC lasted into the early 80s… and weren’t those made in the Fort? I know Scouts were.

    one day I’d like to make a camper out of one of these, too:

    http://www.buypinzgauer.com/

    Danny, how do you bury links in text like that? all I can do is set the link out separately as you see above… this is with Firefox 5.0.

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  24. Danny said on May 9, 2009 at 12:15 pm

    Moe, that article got me thinking about a recent conversation I had with an old friend with whom I’ve just reconnected after 27 years, finding out that we only live 20 miles from one another.

    We were both math nerds together in 7th grade algebra class, top of the class. And with math and science, this remained the case for the duration of junior and senior high with the exception that I got less nerdy and we ended up having different peer groups. I think that this was mainly due to the language barrier he had back then as English was not his primary language (he’s Korean and as he puts it, was right off the boat in 7th grade).

    Anyway, my friend, (John, I’ll call him) and I both went on to pursue engineering degrees, but when he graduated he did something I did not. When interviewing at HP, he asked to speak to one of their top design engineers and while talking to the guy, John did a mental calculation regarding how much the fellow must make and what his lifetime income and assets would be if he traveled this path. In the end, John decided that even though he had an electrical and biomedical engineering degree from one of the most prestigious schools in the nation, this was not the path for him.

    So then he went on to pursue a medical degree at one of the top 5 med schools in the nation and along the way, married and had his first 3 children before he’d finished his residency. After med school, he went on to practice as an attending physician at a major hospital in a big city in the western United States.

    Six years into this medical career, he grew impatient with getting passed over for promotions and decided he must do something different. He almost became a stock trader (and is apparently a very savvy investor to this day), but in the end he went into private practice in a cosmetic field of medicine that is totally elective with no insurance companies dictating his fees.

    John, has done very well. He has a wonderful wife, four wonderful children and a great house with a commanding view of the ocean. And he is a nice guy who loves people and gives of his time. I’m very proud of him and we both marvel at how things turned for us both given our extremely humble beginnings.

    But here’s the interesting thing, he said that if he had it to do all over, he probably would have just gotten a business degree, because that is really how his mind works. All the studies in engineering and medicine were just a waste of his time. He loves business and it intrigues him.

    Me, I love the engineering and though I didn’t get the financial gains that John did (at least not yet), I don’t think I’d trade. Two weeks ago I was reading a giant tome on Bolted Joint Analysis .. and loving it. Last week, I was researching technical details on the Wind Industry for a presentation on business opportunites. Very fun. I typically do a massive amount of technical reading in my off time, but I enjoy it.

    Anyway, at the end of night of our first visit, John and I ended up singing the verse from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Koda-Chrome.” When I think of all the crap I learned back in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. Our wives were cracking up.

    So my three-clause advice: Find something you love, something that pays the bills and be the best you can be at it. I would also add, don’t allow anyone to funnel you into a “standard” career path with a standard arc of advancement. Always be looking for opportunities to take what you love and apply in ways that other people are not. A friend of mine at work just got a high profile position created for him doing something that is very needed and something that he loves. He saw the blind spot, imagined a way to apply his skills to improve things, approached some of the company brass with a proposal and voila.

    Let your son know that no one else is going to be as invested in his own future as he will be. He needs to always be thinking, reading, researching, imagining. Don’t waste time. Take chances.

    Sorry for the long post. I hope it was wisdom.

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  25. Danny said on May 9, 2009 at 12:22 pm

    Basset, here is how you do it:

    <a href="http://example.com/">Example</a>

    So you need to go to a web page that you want to link to. Copy the whole address from the address bar including the “http” part and put it in the quotations as shown above. Then, come up with the descriptive text that you want to be highlighted and clickable. And of course, use all the tags and angle brackets as shown in the syntax.

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  26. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 9, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    I’d love a blue Rolls-Royce converted into a pickup, just to see how often people i met were in on the gag.

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  27. Danny said on May 9, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    Jeff, when I first read that, I saw “just to see how often people I met would gag.”

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  28. Rana said on May 9, 2009 at 1:50 pm

    Find something you love, something that pays the bills and be the best you can be at it.

    Good advice – though I’ve not had the fortune yet of figuring out a way to achieve all three!

    (It’s a bit like that joke/piece of wisdom that you can have two – but not all three – of the following when paying for construction work: fast, cheap, well-done.)

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  29. moe99 said on May 9, 2009 at 2:01 pm

    Thanks Danny! He is a physics major, math minor so I’m thinking he’ll do just fine. But great advice to pass along.

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  30. Danny said on May 9, 2009 at 2:57 pm

    Rana, in my 20’s a buddy of mine had a similar expression regarding dating: you can have good looks, good personality, or availability. Choose any two.

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  31. basset said on May 9, 2009 at 10:08 pm

    <<Then, come up with the descriptive text that you want to be highlighted and clickable

    And do what with it?

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  32. Linda said on May 10, 2009 at 7:30 am

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  33. Danny said on May 11, 2009 at 12:54 pm

    Basset, sorry if my explanation was confusing. Let me try again. Here is an example of exactly what I would type in the comment box:

    Now, I’ll never own a <a href="http://www.unimogcentre.com/unimogprinc.html">Unimog</a>, but I’ve always liked them.

    And when I submit the comment, it appears like this:

    Now, I’ll never own a Unimog, but I’ve always liked them.

    So, the url (or web address) that I want to link to is in between the quotation marks and the descriptive text that I want people to be able to click on is, Unimog, and it comes after the first closed angle bracket and before the </a>.

    And all of it is within a sentence.

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