That’s what it seems like to me at any rate. I just got back a little while ago from visiting a lady who was selling a color printer I was interested in buying. I returned printer-less and with a few gray hairs on my head (probably) from the stress.

The ad sounded good, a used printer that was still in good condition although some of the programing features didn’t seem to work properly anymore. It was a xerox phaser 8560 printer though (which sells for several hundred new) and the asking price was posted as $50. All in all, not a bad deal, right? WRONG!

So I drove up to ‘Cruces at the arranged time to pay for the printer and bring it home. And since Denali is acting like my shadow I let the little kitty tag along for the ride. Turns out the printer in question wasn’t a Phaser 8560 or even a Xerox period. It was an HP. But it was still a decent one, she demonstrated that it did indeed work well still, let me which functions that weren’t working. And hey, it was fax stuff and a timer. Features I could live without just fine. So despite it not being the brand I thought it was I was willing to buy it anyway.

Really, I should have realized that if she lied about the brand she was lying about other things as well. Somehow though, when I took out the $50 to pay her I was still surprised when she claimed that she had changed her mind about the price and wasn’t selling it for less than $400 dollars now. At first I seriously thought she was joking. $400 for a used-printer missing features, really? I mean, shit, that’s the price I’d expect to pay for an awesome one at Staples of Office Depot or something. But nope, she was dead serious. I tried to haggle the price but she was not budging so eventually I just said to hell with it. We had an agreed price for a specific kind of printer, she lied about the brand and I was still willing to deal. Then she tries to cheat me on the price. Uh, no, I ain’t that nice.

So as I’m turning to leave she had the gall to call me a liar and a thief and accuse me of trying to cheat her. Then she tries to threaten to call the police on me if I don’t hold to my bargain. I was just like, yeah lady, call the cops, they’ll just laugh at ya for your stupidity.

Eventually I got out of there without any trouble (sans a whole lot of being screamed at) but it was still a horrible experience I do not wish to repeat.

So I am still without a printer, but considering the fact that I’ve been debating on whether or not to buy memory for my laptop that may be a good thing. Well, maybe not. I really did have my heart set on finally getting a new printer. Especially a color one that was just so friggin’ awesome to boot.

I guess that’s what I get from trying to buy from the classifieds. I’d heard bad things about some people’s experiences with Craigslist but never with regular old classifieds before.