Day 124: The Shipment

Woke up and enjoyed the view from the new dorm. This picture is obviously a recreation of the very first picture I took for this blog. Wow, a lot has changed in the 123 days since I took that first pic. But the view hasn't, and it's still great. Much better than the parking lot view that we had last year in Building Q. I snapped the picture as soon as I woke up and then set about the main business for a day. Getting a table for the living room.

My roommates and I had been discussing the possibility of getting a table for a while. Last year we had a small coffee table that one of the other kids brought, but we didn't have that this year. So we did what any sensible, poor college students would do: we checked craigslist.

Turned out there were two viable options for cheap coffee tables. One was completely free: if we got there before anyone else, the furniture was ours. Another one had a $20 price tag, but it was a nicer looking table and had wheels for easy mobility, and it had some sweet storage options. We decided to check out the free one first, because, like, why not? Even if we ended up getting the $20 table, we'd have the free one that we could maybe give to our friends or sell to someone else to make a quick profit. We looked up the address for the free one: there was no city, no zipcode, just a street name and the number of the house. We googled it to the best of our ability and saw that it was in Cape Coral. The $20 table didn't have an address, just a phone number located in Naples.

We were on our way to Cape Coral!

Forty minutes later, we're driving around the community where this address is supposedly located, but conspicuously enough the house numbers skip JUST past the one where this guy is supposed to live. We roll around asking the natives, and none of them seem to have a clue, though they're all nice enough to try anyways. Eventually we run into an educated woman who lets us know that Naples and Cape Coral have extremely similar addresses, and we're probably looking for the one in Naples.

Why couldn't the craigslist guy just write down what city he was in >.<

Now we're headed for Naples, having gone an hour out of our way. At this point we call the number for the $20 table since we're headed that way anyway, but she tells us that the table has already been sold. We were expecting to come out of this with two tables, and now we're potentially looking at zero. Still, we haven't given up hope. We drive toward the new address.

We get there and it's this sketchy road sparsely decorated by the occasional house. The address we have is to a small one-story house with a long driveway, no cars parked out front. We knock on the front door, ring the doorbell, etc. Nothing. We peak inside the house, there's absolutely nothing in there, it's completely barren. However, from the window we can see all the way out onto the back porch, where sits, in complete solitude, a kitchen table. A beaten up, raggedy looking table. Not exactly what the ad said, it looked nothing like a coffee table, but there it was. Just sitting out there.

We waited around for a little bit, still trying the doorbell and knocking to no avail. Finally we agree that the place has been abandoned, the table is unwanted, and it's sitting there expressly for us to take it. And after going over an hour out of our way, not to mention the drive back and forth from Naples, we weren't leaving this trip emptyhanded. So we went out to the back porch which was unlocked, picked the table up, and carried it off to the car.

It actually doesn't look too bad in our living room.

I can't show the world to you
Not my world, not this time
It's like a secret told too soon

Song: "Kids" by MGMT. One of the best driving songs ever. A really refreshing and upbeat song. Gets you going in the morning. Electronic indie.