It’s meant to give you a warm glow of contentment to feel that you are getting rid of your excess stuff in a socially and ecologically beneficial way. It’s supposed to be a way of connecting to people in your ‘community’. So why then, do I hate loathe and detest Freecycle? Why have I had stuff piling up for years, thinking that I ought to put it on Freecycle, but dreading the deed?
One. Those people who email about one item with some totally plausible story about why they in particular really need it. You know, those same people who email about a totally different kind of item the next week with an incompatible story about why they really really need that item.
Two. The people who email within a couple of minutes to say, ‘yes please, they’d really love an item and are coming straight round to get it’, but when there are further questions about it, and I email them to say, ‘do you still want it’, somehow, they never bother to explain that on second thoughts they don’t want it. You are meant to get that their silence means that. In other words, ‘communication’ is not actually a two-way flow of information between two parties, but one party sticking up their hand and shouting ‘me me, over here, over here’ but then not bothering to explain that they had wandered off. As a way of ‘connecting with your community’, it kind of lacks something.
Three. The Ingrates. Top of the list must come The Man Who Collected the Proms Tickets. Annoyingly, I found out a few days before the concert that I couldn’t go to the Proms one year. I could easily have sold them, but I put two tickets, each worth £38, on Freecycle. Within an hour I had loads of requests for them. One lady said she’d love to go, she’d never been before. So I chose her. A few hours later there was a ring on the door, and a man stood there with a snide look on his face. ‘The Wife’ had sent him round, (reluctantly, his body language said) to collect the tickets. He snatched them out of my hand, with a look of ‘poor me what has the daft old bat got me into now, what a drag having to drive over just to collect these tickets for some poncy concert’ in his eyes, as if he somehow expected me to sympathise with his plight. No ‘thanks’, just snatched the tickets and drove off. Wish now I’d ripped them up in front of him.
Four. You have to collect. Part of the whole system. Nobody has stopped to think that this more or less rules out people without access to cars. So only those with a car, or the social capital of knowing someone who’ll offer you a lift, can reasonably access this great system.
Five. The wretched ‘Fair Offer’ policy that kind of locks you into having endless damned emails for a day or so before ‘deciding’ whose pathetic fib is the least implausible, who most deserves your charity. Or else opting out of the Fair Offer system which makes you sound like you are ‘unfair’. Sickening. One is forced into the mindset of a Victorian philanthropist, deciding on the deserving and undeserving poor. Give me a break, I just want to clear out my ruddy car port.
Six. The truly laughable gulf between the puny ‘offers’ and the grandiose ‘wants’ sets up such a poor view of the human race, I sure hope there are no Martian anthropologists looking at us. Makes me embarrassed to be human.
Seven. Hating Freecycle makes me feel mean. Which, given that I’ve put loads on it and never had anything off it (see Four), doesn’t seem fair. But in a sense, it is fair, because the business of just trying to give something away really does turn me, not just into the worst kind of judgemental patronising philanthropist, but is a hair’s breadth away from turning me into an actual misanthropist.