You Suck at Craigslist

YSaC, Vol. 434: It’s waiting to take you away.

Written by

drmk

in

Regular readers might remember the Case of the Missing Drawer. I think we may have found a post that solves that problem, and establishes the principle of the Conservation of Drawers in the meantime:

TALL 5 DRAWER DRESSER – $65

FOR SALE:

SOLID PINE 5 DRAWER DRESSER. THIS DRESSER IS 53 1/4 ” HIGH BY 17 3/4″ WIDE BY 18″ DEEP. VERY STURDY AND HEAVY. IF INTERESTED PLEASE CALL xxx-xxx-xxxx. THANKS FOR LOOKING.

434

It’s the postulated 6-drawer 5-drawer dresser! And, clearly, the one drawer is not subject to the laws of physics. That must be our magical mystery drawer.

What? Why, yes, I’ll accept the Nobel Prize in Physics for the theory of the Conservation of Drawers! What an honor.

Thanks to Jake for sending this in; Jake, I’ll split the medal with you, but the cash is mine!

Comments

64 responses to “YSaC, Vol. 434: It’s waiting to take you away.”

  1. Sherri Avatar
    Sherri

    Hm, ONE of those drawers (#4 from the top) does look a little like it’s planning a break for freedom. Maybe that’s a mug shot, and the drawer has already escaped.

    1. kelli Avatar
      kelli

      And that would make it a 5 drawer dresser now. The ad has become perfectly clear to me. It’s just an old picture like people use on dating sites.

      1. SoundsLikeVla Avatar
        SoundsLikeVla

        Beautiful but Broken
        5 drawer solid pine dresser for sale. The 6th drawer fell out before I could finish installing my laundry into it. It looks exactly like the picture.

  2. JcT Avatar
    JcT

    Ow ow ow, just looking at that 5-drawer thing gives me splinters. It could be part of the Conservation of Drawers thing, but it looks like every drawer-front is a different height and width. Plus it doesn’t look sanded! I visualize pulling out a pair of underwear and discovering after I have put them on that they are full of tiny wood slivers! OW! Especially the bottom drawer, into where all the slivers from the other four/five drawers drop. THAT is where you want to keep your panties and bras, ladies!

    1. MsDolfinn Avatar
      MsDolfinn

      It’s an optical illusion dresser! Not only does it look like it has 6 drawers…they look different sizes. However if you measure them, they are the exact same.

    2. sarajean80 Avatar
      sarajean80

      “Panty Splinters” would be a good name for a band.

      1. Isaac Avatar
        Isaac

        “AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ALL THE WAY FROM ITHACA, BUFFALO, AND A TOUR OF THE FINGER LAKES REGION, PANTY SPLINTERS!!”

        I’d go see them. Or at least I’d buy the tour t-shirt.

        1. sarajean80 Avatar
          sarajean80

          I could hear that in my head and had to explain to my coworkers why I was laughing. All that came out was “The Panty Splinters are up in the Finger Lakes region.”

        2. Lola Avatar
          Lola

          “The Panty Splinters are up in the Finger Lakes region.”
          Ladies and gentlemen, we have a tour shirt slogan!

        3. sarajean80 Avatar
          sarajean80

          Done in tasteful shades of pink, of course.

    3. Count Blah Avatar
      Count Blah

      The distortion plus the crooked drawer gives the dresser a very Dr. Seussian look to me.

      I don’t want splinters in my shirts
      I don’t want splinters in my skirts
      I don’t want splinters here or there
      espec’lly not my UNDERWEAR!

  3. Jinx Avatar
    Jinx

    Knowing what I know about physics, I bet there is a cat in the magical drawer!

    1. drmk Avatar
      drmk

      Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t.

      1. Count Blah Avatar
        Count Blah

        …and only if you’re not looking.

    2. sarajean80 Avatar
      sarajean80

      It’s the lesser known Schrodinger’s chest of drawers. You will not know if there is a cat in the drawer until you open it to look.

      1. Lola Avatar
        Lola

        You won’t know? Mine would be making plenty of noise to be let out of it, if it’s anything like when he gets shut into the closet by mistake. (He insists on visiting all of them daily. I refer to it as the “Narnia check.”

        1. drmk Avatar
          drmk

          We call it the “closet inspection”.

        2. Lola Avatar
          Lola

          Mine has the Narnia reference because I actually have a wardrobe, and he has tried to get into that too.

        3. sarajean80 Avatar
          sarajean80

          Mine prefer the kitchen cabinets. I don’t have a single intact bag of chips, most resemble coarse breadcrumbs by the time the girls are finished with them.

        4. JcT Avatar
          JcT

          There is no way to put my cat in a drawer. Tuffy can sense when I want to mess with her, er, I mean, when I’m feeling playful. When she senses it, she goes over to her scratcher and sharpens her claws until my feeling of playfulness goes away.

          I guess I could put her scratcher in a drawer and see what happens…

      2. SoundsLikeVla Avatar
        SoundsLikeVla

        How did all you lucky souls get mere closet cats? Mine are stealth cats aka war beasts. They live on the ducts in the basement and dive bomb us. Our kids see them so rarely upstairs in the main rooms that they are surprised to catch sight of them. I have had many blouses ruined by war beast raids. They pounce on you from the rafters, shred the fabric from your shoulders, then expose their soft underbellies and “maow” for treats before disappearing until the next unsuspecting soul goes into the dungeon. I wanted lap cats but instead have a security system that rivals Brinks….as long as you break into the basement instead of the front door.

    3. jackie31337 Avatar
      jackie31337

      If you value the cat’s life, whatever you do, don’t open the drawer!

  4. sarajean80 Avatar
    sarajean80

    Nothing screams “Yard sale reject!” louder than photographing an item while it’s still surrounded by everything else that did not sell. I was not interested in buying it then, what makes you think seeing a picture online will make it suddenly more attractive?

    1. Windrose Avatar
      Windrose

      Good point. I’ll pass on the dresser, but I am interested in that three-legged table in the background.

  5. mudslicker Avatar
    mudslicker

    I’m wondering if the price of $65 was on the sticker when it was in the yard sale that day. They must have been covering their bases by trying to sell it several different ways. But why stop there? I suspect its picture is on the local milk cartons and billboards as well.

    House for sale: it’s 612 1/4″ long x 360 1/8″ deep x 540 1/25″ high. We’ve come up with 6 different results after trying to count the windows and bedrooms. We give up. Here’s a picture. You figure it out.

    1. sarajean80 Avatar
      sarajean80

      Because here at Apathy Realty, we really care about your business! Or not. Whatever. I’m going to go watch TV now.

      1. Lola Avatar
        Lola

        So that’s how all of those subprime mortgages got accepted. No one gave a crap. Suddenly, all is clear.

      2. jackie31337 Avatar
        jackie31337

        Apathy! Apathy! That’s our cry! A-P-A-T-H…. H…. aw screw it

        1. queensbee Avatar
          queensbee

          laughing hard just thinking about the Apathy cheerleaders…. they might be particularly useful at bridge tournaments.

  6. lost_compass Avatar
    lost_compass

    More research to be done, though, on what mechanism enables the drawer to metamorphose from a long, metal-handled entity to its present shorter, wooden-handled form. Is it a biological (read: chameleon-like) event, or a physical transformation (brought on by its transport through a wormhole, perhaps)?

    I await your findings.

  7. Batman Avatar
    Batman

    I would like to point out that biologists have demonstrated that simple animals have a basic visual ability to recognize small numbers and tell if there was a change. In other words, a crow will recognize a group of 6 is different than 5 with a glance. Dogs can recognize even larger numbers, like 7 or even 8.

    This leads me to conclude that someone’s hamster did the QA check on this entry. Everyone knows hamsters are unable to recognize numbers above 5.

  8. queensbee Avatar
    queensbee

    pine you say?? take the drawers out, and you have a pine box of another type, bwaaahaa.
    sorry. got carried away. get it? carried away???
    stop me before i hurt someone.
    and no, i do not want your yard sale reject dresser.

  9. Irregular Fractal Avatar
    Irregular Fractal

    I await the further development of Furniture Physics, as it has long been an area of interest for me. I’m currently studying the nuances of Mastercraft’s Second Law, F=ma.
    The force required to open a dresser drawer in the morning is equal to the product of the number of minutes that you are currently late for work and your alertness level (measured in ppm caffeine in bloodstream).

  10. Kat Avatar
    Kat

    The bottom two drawers could actually be one deep drawer but for visual appeal the designer made it look like two. This is how my desk is, it looks like there are three drawers on each side but “two” are actually one deep drawer.

    1. Mrphysic Avatar
      Mrphysic

      My first thought was that they were selling the 5 drawers and that the 6th one came free – this person is clearly a master salesman…….6 DRAWERS FOR THE PRICE OF 5 – BARGAIN

  11. Rhonda Avatar
    Rhonda

    Perhaps one isn’t really a drawer.. it’s just there for decoration.

    1. PrincessLuceval Avatar
      PrincessLuceval

      It’s that common decorating tactic, the fauxdrawer.

      1. Isaac Avatar
        Isaac

        Or fauxwer, as the hipsters dub it.

        1. Jami(no "e") Avatar
          Jami(no “e”)

          Ah yes, the fauxwer. Those crazy hipster kids and their nonsensical words. It was the hipsters who stole the original drawer and now they’re trying to pass it off as something new and hip like they did with bad 80’s fashion, folk music and girl’s jeans.

  12. Colleen in MA Avatar
    Colleen in MA

    correct spelling? check
    correct dimensions? check
    picture is positioned with correct orientation?
    polite ending? extra credit.

    I’m willing to overlook the counting mistake in light of all the things this poster did get right. Let me now enjoy a moment of zen …

  13. KellyQ Avatar
    KellyQ

    I feel like I’m on acid looking at this picture.

    And I bet it really is a 5 drawer dresser. Maybe the bottom two drawers are an optical illusion that you go to pull one and the other one below is just a panel of what it would look like if there was a drawer there. And then you open it and its a deep as two drawers! Either way, whoever posted that looks very unintelligent. Maybe it’s $65 dollars because the conversation kinda went like this:

    GUY: “What do you think this is worth?”

    5-leg chair: “I don’t know…maybe fifty or sixty dollars, like ten dollars a drawer. I mean its heavy. and that is very important for a dresser to be heavy. heavy equals expensive. And its deep. 18″ inches in fact.”

    GUY: “but they will never understand my abstract photograph of this sturdy dresser and the fact it has a 5/6 drawer.. which is very unique… and classy.”

    5-leg chair: “Well how about you charge them $65, and that way the most deserving person will recieve the dresser, because they can look at the photograph, and see EXACTLY where your coming from.”

  14. Sparky Avatar
    Sparky

    The fact that all the drawers seem to be heading in different directions except the bottom two, make it obvious that the bottom two are actually one deep drawer. Which has apparently never been opened. In fact, maybe they put all the other drawers in crooked to illustrate this! Yeah! That explains it.

    Still doesn’t explain the ugly factor, though. This thing could benefit from some random pink spray paint.

  15. Heather Avatar
    Heather

    Maybe they got to five and just got tired of counting. It wears one out, you know. Hard work.

    1. sarajean80 Avatar
      sarajean80

      They ran out of fingers and didn’t want to take their shoes off.

      1. skrib Avatar
        skrib

        Aww, now we can’t make fun of them since they’ve lost a hand.

  16. Jess Avatar
    Jess

    A properly punctuated ad for National Punctuation Day! Now if we could just do something about their math skills we’d be all set.

  17. Csdx Avatar
    Csdx

    it’s waiting to take me away (ha ha), to the funny farm?

    1. sarajean80 Avatar
      sarajean80

      Where life is beautiful all the time and I’ll be
      happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats.

    2. Mimi Avatar
      Mimi

      To the happy home. With trees and flowers and chirping birds and basket weavers who sit and smile and twiddle their thumbs and toes and they’re coming to take me away, ha-haaa!!!

    3. drmk Avatar
      drmk

      I was thinking more “Magical Mystery Drawer”, but yours works too.

      1. queensbee Avatar
        queensbee

        its an old song. from 1965. “theyre coming to take me away….” the mental health professionals found it insulting and it was removed from the airwaves, haha. but i have a 45 rpm copy in my old records. the reverse side – was the whole thing in reverse!

        1. drmk Avatar
          drmk

          I know the song — I grew up with Dr. Demento!

        2. frigglesnitz Avatar
          frigglesnitz

          The good Doctor was followed by the “King Biscuit Flour Hour” in the area where I grew up. I thought those were random words strung together, King-Biscuit-Flower-Hour, some sort of hippie thing. So much for sponsorship leading to brand name recognition.
          Course, I was 10.

  18. Ed Snyder Avatar
    Ed Snyder

    This is the way that The Doctor from “Doctor Who” stores his clothing inside the TARDIS. Since the TARDIS is larger on the inside than the outside, all that extra space has to come from somewhere (simple Physics: Nootun’s Law of Conservation of Space). The extra space comes from a series of dressers that are larger on the outside than the inside.

  19. queensbee Avatar
    queensbee

    i saw dr demento at a folkie music festival. maybe 10 yrs ago. he was actually — strange!!! (shocking) is he still on the air anyplace??
    fish heads, fish heads…

    1. Ed Snyder Avatar
      Ed Snyder

      Check out http://www.drdemento.com/ apparently he’s still around.

  20. Brucker Avatar
    Brucker

    Did anyone here see today’s “Pearls Before Swine”?

    http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2009-09-24/

  21. Mrphysic Avatar
    Mrphysic

    I saw the capitals again and was expecting the ad to read more like:

    LOL SO I AM TRYING TO COUNT THE NUMBER OF DRAWERS IN MY DRESSER BUT I’VE RUN OUT OF FINGERS AND MY OTHER HAND IS TYPING THIS. CAN YOU HELP ME FINISH COUNTING THEM LOL. THIS IS SOOOO EMBARRASSING.

  22. Katy Avatar
    Katy

    I was talking with my husband the other day about the merits of teaching toddlers to read, and how it used to be reading education didn’t start until first grade.

    If we showed the National Education Association some of these Craigslist posts we’d have to start teaching numbers the moment the baby exits the womb.

    So thanks, drmk, for screwing things up for the next generation. The literate two year olds will thank you.

    1. tigprincess Avatar
      tigprincess

      Perhaps you should teach them from conception? or even – not allow conception? Or only those able to count beyond 25 should be allowed to conceive? and be able to read and write and punctuate and spell and pronounce … sorry, carried away to perfection land. I’ll take my tablets and return to Earth.

  23. Ray Avatar
    Ray

    Conservation of Drawers would not be a good band name.

  24. Penn Avatar
    Penn

    The bottom drawer is a double drawer that looks like two drawers for aesthetic purposes. Next….

    1. drmk Avatar
      drmk

      You know, I want to believe that, but I don’t. There’s nothing connecting the two bottom drawers, and you can see the different color of the body of the dresser between the two bottom drawers.

  25. Tamfang Avatar
    Tamfang

    This is a tall 5 drawer dresser, so naturally it has more drawers than an ordinary 5 drawer dresser.

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