Warning! If you meet her.... She calls herself Sara. In her late 30's, early 40's, she wears scraggly bleached blond hair, drives a red SUV circa 2005, and is accompanied by a little blond yap-dog, called "Baby Girl". Her "line" is showing up after a garage sale which hasn't cleaned everything out, saying she goes to swap meets and is looking to partner with somebody who has the merchandise for her to help sell. They'll split the proceeds 60-40, not bothering to mention whose share is the 60. Turns out neither is, because, after coaxing you into continuing your garage sale a few more days, she'll disappear with an incomplete ledger of sales and most of the proceeds from what is recorded in there. As well as whatever she can steal while she's in your house looking for what else can "go out to sell".
Let's back it up a week or so. The first weekend in November, Rich coordinated with the neighbor across the street to hold simultaneous garage sales. Both did fairly well. Problem is, Rich still had two more sales worth of merchandise. I had an unusable carport, patio, and could barely navigate a path through the lanai to take the dog out to the back yard. Which was - is - also a mess, by the way. I'm still waiting to turn the yard crew we hire loose in it to deal with a dying - or damaged - pine tree as well as clean up all the pruned branches from my last few weeks out there, and blow out all the accumulated leaf litter from the last year.
So when Sara turned up, talking partnership and connections and locations, Rich saw a solution to those problems. Besides, it's the only income around right now, and he/we insisted on mask wearing by prospective customers. Nearly all complied.
The first day Sara showed up, Rich walked a mask down to her car for her. She rarely wore it. That was my first strike against her.
The second was her yap dog. Sara needed to use the bathroom, so Rich asked could she come in. Reluctantly, I said yes. Our pandemic rule has been nobody comes in the house. The whole 25 minutes or so she was in there the dog yowled as though it was being tortured. Imagine trying to watch TV or read to that background! The third strike came shortly afterwards, when I went to use it. She's one of those people who a: lines the toilet seat with toilet paper, and b: walks away without bothering to remove said paper from either the seat or floor. GAG! She was requested through Rich to find an alternative. For the dog too, whose entry into the house disturbed Heather Too so much she refused going through the lanai to outdoors with predictable results to have to be cleaned up from the rug. Mine to take care of again, of course.
I tried to simply avoid Sara. I could stay inside and in the back yard, she and Rich "owned" the carport and front yard. It was going to be for one day, Wednesday, for a sale, then Thursday would be packing up and taking things away for a Friday swap meet. Of course, she was totally scatterbrained and disorganized enough that he dubbed her Queen of Chaos. If only that were all of it! Resulting events make me think it might just be a ruse to encourage you to dismiss her.
I got talked into allowing the sale for another day, with Thursday evening being when the remainders were to be hauled off for the two of them to take to Friday's swap meet. Late afternoon, Sara loaded up her car for the "first" trip. We haven't seen her since.
Irritation started eroding trust, so Rich began the hunt for her ledger of sales and cache of proceeds from it. First the ledger listed less than Richard made in a single sale. Even of the puny recorded income, most of it had vanished with Sara. Then the real problems started piling up. The most valuable items which hadn't sold had vanished, carefully picked out and squirreled away during those times when Rich was occupied or in another location, or tucked in with other things she was loading into her car "for Friday's swap meet.".
She'd come in and raided the lanai of his more valuable items as well. He'd come in and seen her going through his things, not sale things, and told her to quit or take off. Later going through the piles he'd seen her handling, he discovered many of his personal things missing as well. In a later conversation, I asked him who had paid for the supper that had been cooked outside the patio in the little Weber grill. He had, adding that she had offered to buy supper the next night "after her food stamps had come through.
Yes, I know it's not called food stamps now, but I forget the jargon. Anyway, her allotment was supposed to come through the next day, and she offered to pick up the tab for that next night's supper. Of course, it "didn't come through" on time. As soon as he told me that, I called "Bullshit." It comes in credit on a plastic card, renewed automatically each month on that date so long as the recipient qualifies. It's as regular as social security. At this point in our conversation Rich admitted it was then where he should have started questioning what was going on.
Steve and I privately questioned later whether he has some kind of invisible sign on his forehead which says "Mark." He tries to be useful and helpful, and usually is. We think a certain kind of person reads that and takes advantage.
Friday turned into a day of packing up stuff to get hauled off to a thrift shop close by that sends its proceeds to support education. First, however, customers were still showing up, and Rich made enough to likely cover the actual cash Sara made away with. Not that he could replace all the stolen items of course, but his mood lightened somewhat. By Saturday things were lined up in rows inside boxes and crates for loading in the car. I had promised him I would happily drive him for however many loads it took to get rid of the stuff. Our last load arrived 10 minutes after they closed for the day, so tomorrow we'll head out in the morning and dump off a load packed to the roof of the car.
There will still be clothing to sort through, into categories of toss, donate, and how-did-Rich's-clothes-get-mixed-in-here? Some of the shelving and whatnots Rich used to organize and display sale items well be coming back into the house to help store Rich's possessions in the tiny space he's cramped into.
I'm hoping he'll be taking our strongly worded request to find himself some other way of supporting himself, hard as that is these days. Some of the stuff he brought here for sale was accompanied - or should I say occupied? - by bugs of the blood loving kind. Heather Too is getting her flea control to kill off any of those that find her tasty. We're not sure whether it's totally fair to blame the bed bug infestation on him, but he deserves full credit for some very stubborn lice. Those have gotten so bad out in his area that he's taken to shaving every hair he can find off his head and body so the nits have no place to cling to.
(I need to sneak up and take a picture!)
He does have one comforting thought about Sara. He thinks he witnessed her absently scratching herself in a very familiar way just before she took off. Likely she picked up something from going through stuff that wasn't ready for sale in her hurry to scarf up anything she could lay her hands on and stuff in a pocket. He hadn't gotten around to telling her what the hazards of such unanticipated misbehavior could be.
Tee. Hee. Hee.
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