How to Give Your Stuff Away for Free.

In the attempt to de-clutter my apartment I'm forever assessing my junk and giving it away. My stuff is in pretty good shape, but I'm too lazy to try to sell it, so I give it all away via the Craigslist "Free" section. I gave away all this stuff this weekend: a bunch of cheap wineglasses and water goblets that were used for large dinner parties, three decorative pillows from Crate and Barrel in colors I never really liked so they just sat in my closet for the past two years, and several handbags from when I was into vintage-y, feminine clutches. They, too have been sitting in the closets for the past 5 years and have not seen the light of day or the moonlight of evening since 2002.

At least, I'm trying to give away the handbags. The woman who is coming to get them is completely unable to follow directions and has been on the phone with DD for the past HALF HOUR trying to find our apartment. I should have known when she slowwwly asked me for my address... and I patiently told her it was on the ad and gently suggested she do a mapquest or google maps kind of thing. Then she asked me to hold on while she wrote down the address from the internet and then read me the directions from her computer.

Giving your gently-used items that you no longer want away for free is good, of course. You don't want them, they're still good, and someone else really wants them.
They don't go into the landfill (at least not for a while). But sometimes dealing with strangers you meet in the free section of a classified ads website is excruciatingly difficult! My formula (which obviously failed miserably with this handbag woman) is to take clear photos of the stuff, and include photos in the ad. This keeps people from asking questions. Then I record an outgoing message on my voice mail saying people can leave a message if they are interested in the stuff. When I have a few messages, which usually takes all of thirty seconds, I take down my ad and listen to the messages.
Then I call back the person who sounds coherent and somewhat intelligent. I dunno. I called the handbag lady because she was talking to her obviously small child in the background and I felt like I wanted the young mom to have some pretty, almost-new handbags. After talking to her about five times for a total of about 45 minutes telling her how to get here, I not only wish I'd never called her, but I judgementally think she never should have reproduced.