Selling a car? Try social media...and stuff...

Instead of waiting until the last minute to sell (as I did with my condo), I spent today getting my car ready for sale. After the "manager's special - plus" at Auto Bell, a Dirt Devil vacuuming of the floor mats, an Armor All wipe down of every non-fuzzy surface, I realized a few things...One, that I had a massive headache from the work and the southern heat, and two, that Star-Dog hair is really difficult to remove from my car.

I talked to Joe (aka Merry Joe) after my excruciating efforts whilst slumped on the couch.

"Whew," I said, "that was a bit of work. Now I just have to take pics of it and upload adverts onto some car sale-y Web sites."
"When are you going to do that?" he asked, knowing my procrastinating self all too well.
"Um...I figured I'd do it tomorrow. It's been a busy day already. Some lady accused me of dog abuse when I ran into the U-Haul place for ten minutes to get boxes at 10 a.m. this morning, and more people viewed the house this morning and..."
"Oh, that's a good idea. Why don't you wait until after you move to list it? Then you can get stressed about it like the condo."

Um...yeah...

I dragged myself off of the couch, armed with some more...um...Armor All wipes and my camera. After cleaning to a point where I felt it okay to take pics to send to potential buyers, I checked Kelly Blue Book, Carmax, Auto Trader, and some other car-y sites. Then I tweaked.

"They all look so...pristine compared to my car," I wailed to Joe on the phone.
"Leave it to you to find the black lining of every cloud. So be honest about it in the description."

I did. I wrote up an honest account of my car and posted it on Craigslist, eBay, and the Charlotte Observer sites. Done.

Within just two hours of a Saturday night (don't these folks have an offline life?), I had four people wanting to come and view the car - all of them from Craigslist, in fact, and all of them fully informed of the (a-hem!) cosmetic imperfections of my lil' Benzo. Veddddddy interesting. It was all so quick (and relatively painless) that I wonder what people did before the advent of the Internet. I mean, I know people would check the Sunday classifieds for cars, but um...what did they do before that? Tell a neighbor and hope? Twenty-four of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation. There's a shift in the way we communicate.

And I love it. As a side note, as I write this, the movie Serendipity is on in the background. I still think of this move as serendipitous. The person who buys my car (and my condo!) will be part of that serendipitous piece of my memory that helped me in my move to England. Rock on.