Collaboration Chronicles

Following my Nov. 8 Adventures at the abandoned storage auction:

Last night I was doing my regular home business stuff, and came across an ad for a sale that looked too good to be true. It was a private owner trying to auction 1 locker by 7PM, because he was leaving town in the morning. Could be a fishy setup but the ad promised treasure. I have no storage, but if I could unload it fast per piece, the work would pay off. There was lots of computer stuff- not up to date, true, but possible to make the money back on only a portion of it- it seemed.

I dropped everything because it was only a 15-min. bike ride away. When I got there I saw that the promised treasure was iffy-to-awful. I might have considered it based on 2 of the items, except the guy behaved like he was literally on crack. I wouldn’t have bought a locker full of gold bricks that way.

This happened to me once before, except the guy was sane (at first) and his stuff was good. I bought and made bank on re-selling, until 6 weeks later he emailed me from Prague begging for his stuff back. There was no business reason I should have replied, but there were humanitarian reasons. He got half back in return for my original investment. Each of us got half a loss, and half lucky. It was a pain to deal with.

Opportunities like this help learn about risks, hidden costs, and the importance of scoping out what you’re buying and who you’re negotiating with. I lost an hour out of my busy night last night, but you never know if you don’t try, right?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 5:33 am and is filed under Contribution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.