![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/trashpile.jpg\")
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And is about as inflammatory and prone to resulting in aggravation, disappointment and general negativity as some of the more notorious four-letter words out there in the common lexicon.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve spent the better part of a week this month at my dad\u2019s old place in Virginia, my old home, cleaning it out, because as he\u2019s no longer living there, the only logical thing to do would be to empty it out and get rid of it.\u00a0 Of course, that isn\u2019t going to happen on its own, and nobody in my family really seems as eager to not let a valuable asset potential degrade due to neglect as I am, so that has almost entirely fallen on my shoulders to do, despite the fact that I would rather have been doing a hundred other things than driving all the way up there just to clean and struggle to do my job remotely since that home hadn\u2019t had internet access in the last two years.<\/span><\/p>\n I had the brilliant analogy that my dad was basically like Wall-E<\/em><\/a>, in the sense that he seemed to collect an inordinate amount of useless and worthless trash and tchotchkes, but he was pretty good at organizing it and making it look fairly orderly within his own home.\u00a0 However, when it comes to sorting and determining what could be salvaged and what needed to be tossed, it became very, very quickly apparent that the load didn\u2019t jive with the time available, and that pretty much everything needed to be trashed.<\/span><\/p>\n It was like an episode of Storage Wars<\/em> where Dave Hester would always brag about the potential profitability about every single storage unit he won, but that\u2019s because he had a consignment shop where all the bullshit he collected could sit on shelves and make a nickel five months later, as opposed to being moved immediately.\u00a0 My dad had a lot of stuff that honestly could\u2019ve made a few bucks here and there if time were on our side, but in the span of a week, I wasn\u2019t about to try and organize a last second single home flea market for the legions of crap that my dad had hoarded over the last decade and a half.<\/span><\/p>\n Box full of optical mice?\u00a0 Trash.\u00a0 Bag full of brand-new commercial painting supplies?\u00a0 Trash.\u00a0 Boxes full of partially used duct and electrical tape?\u00a0 Trash.\u00a0 Box of tool grade rope?\u00a0 Crate full of commercial paper towels?\u00a0 Industrial tubs full of liquid soap?\u00a0 Trash, trash, trash.<\/span><\/p>\n Amidst all the crap were all sorts of personal and family mementos too, stuff that my sister, my mom or myself didn\u2019t take with us when we all inevitably moved out.\u00a0 And as much as I tend to hesitate when it comes to disposing of anything of such nature, I walked into my week of work with a credo, to harden the heart and let shit go<\/strong>, because otherwise I would accomplish nothing.\u00a0 If nobody cared about this stuff to take with them when they left, nobody is going to care about it when it\u2019s tossed.<\/span><\/p>\n High school yearbooks, shop class projects, little pieces of crap that I may have saved at random points in my life, all part of the trash pile.\u00a0 I had a moment of quiet shock, when my mom took her wedding photo album and tossed it into a box marked for disposal, but seeing as how they are divorced, it\u2019s understandable, but still no less slightly mortifying as a child of said union.<\/span><\/p>\n When my work was done, the house was still in pretty much chaos, but at least it was fairly organized chaos.\u00a0 Originally, I had planned on just being a repeated shuttle back and forth to the dump to dispose of everything that needed to go, but my aunt and my mom meddled and convinced me to pay for professional disposal.\u00a0 Having a little experience with it, I knew to expect a bill north of a grand if we were going to go that route, but the thought of saving myself and my car the labor didn\u2019t hurt, so that\u2019s the choice I made, and I made some calls and reached out to a few companies, and landed with one who would come at a later date to come pick up all the trash.<\/span><\/p>\n Among all the crap, I had pulled aside some items that even I thought, would go quickly, if offered for free to the community, like some extension ladders, a television, and a weed-wacker.\u00a0 Long story short, the ladders moved, but with resistance, and I ended up donating the television and the trimmer to Goodwill when neither generated a lick of interest.<\/span><\/p>\n Additionally, there were also a lot of furniture that I felt had some value in it, and I figured it shouldn\u2019t be hard to leverage the Salvation Army to come pick up some free furniture that they could then flip at their consignment shops; yes, I\u2019m aware of the general negative reputation the internet has over the SA, but I just wanted to get this house cleared in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible, and in the past I\u2019ve used them to help clear out my old house, and they seemed like a logical option.<\/span><\/p>\n After I had left, and the scheduled day of the SA pickup had passed, I called my mom whom I entrusted to be on site to let the SA guys in, and she told me that they took nothing.\u00a0 They came into the home, examined all the marked items, deemed them not suitable quality, and refused to move anything that required traveling a flight of stairs.\u00a0 I knew right away that it wasn\u2019t so much that everything I offered was inadequate, as much as it was around 3:30 pm when they showed up to my place, their truck was probably full, the workers were tired, and they simply did not want to go through the labor of hauling off all the stuff I had asked them to.<\/span><\/p>\n So I basically got exactly what I had paid for \u2013 zero.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s the popular adage that people should never stop learning, and it was at this moment that I decided that I have fully learned an important lesson that I will try to implement into my remaining life, and that free, is bullshit, and to look at anything in life that claims to be free, with the skepticism that I would look at anyone proclaiming to be a Nigerian prince.<\/span><\/p>\n Free, always sounds<\/em> awesome, but free comes with a whole slew of conditionals that are mitigated when there\u2019s some form of transactional currency.\u00a0 And the drawback to free always seems to be at the extreme risk of something often times more valuable than any form of currency, which is time, because with the case of the Salvation Army, their refusal to do their job because their service was free, still cost me a great deal of time, as I did not have a fallback plan, because they did me right in my own previous experience, which was a fallacy in its own right that I need to be mindful of in the future as well.<\/span><\/p>\n But I think about all the times in my life where something has been free, whether it\u2019s been me trying to get something, or me trying to give shit away, and almost all of the instances, have involved aggravation, regret, and questioning why I did in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s like the IHOP fallacy, whenever they do like their free pancake day or whatever, you see on the news people who wait hours for a free short stack of pancakes, when that same short stack would\u2019ve cost like $7 and get it immediately if you paid for it, making those who think about it realize that paying > free.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve gone through great lengths in the past to get free bobbleheads at ballparks, and looking back at all those instances, I can count on one hand where it\u2019s actually been worth it, and I actually applaud myself in any instance where I may have self-policed my time versus free scale and altered my choices in the past.<\/span><\/p>\n I also think about the sheer aggravation of trying to give stuff away on stuff like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, because it seems like something that should be layups, but the flake rate for free shit is so astronomically high, so often times I just end up throwing perfectly good shit away, because I simply grew exasperated with trying to not be wasteful and giving away perfectly good goods, because I\u2019m just tired of people.<\/span><\/p>\n The point of all this is that I have, I truly have, learned, that the word free is not necessarily a good word anymore, and is instead a loaded word, full of conditionals and rules and invisible clauses, that one really needs to understand the risks when they inevitably grow tempted by it, solely because of the potential end result of a transaction with nothing exchanged.<\/span><\/p>\n So many times in life, it\u2019s simply better to just grow up, pay up, and get shit done, without any of the bullshit that free entails.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And is about as inflammatory and prone to resulting in aggravation, disappointment and general negativity as some of the more notorious four-letter words out there in the common lexicon. I\u2019ve spent the better part of a week this month at my dad\u2019s old place in Virginia, my old home, cleaning it out, because as he\u2019s … Continue reading Free is a four-letter word<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[79,100,45,71,129,83,99,156,146,27],"class_list":["post-51168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-cashmoney","tag-comparison","tag-fail","tag-famiry","tag-nostalgia","tag-observations","tag-reminiscing","tag-social-media","tag-triggered","tag-virginia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51168"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51170,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51168\/revisions\/51170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}