You get what you pay for....

I am an advid freecycler. I have never actually gotten anything myself from there, but I do give a lot of stuff away. The idea is that one persons trash is anothers treasure so rather than throwing something away that may have use to someone else you list it on here and maybe someone will want it. A few of the things we've gotten rid of are: a boat, motors, trailer, old bottles, old windows (for art), bricks, oars... just stuff we weren't using anymore. Everything listed on there has to be free. I've had nothing but good experiences with the people I've dealt with so far. Most of them send a nice thank you email and a couple have offered to pay (we have declined of course).

So we had these old RC cars in our garage that we were going to toss. Since all the parts were there and I know that a couple years ago John did have them running, I decided to list them on freecycle. Almost immediately someone replied saying they lived like 5 miles away and would pick them up that night. Sweet. Came and got them, I had the dust swept off of them and they were in a box, there were 3 cars and the controllers, batteries and charger. Here's the listing as I wrote it: (I will post the correspondence in italics and my comments in regular type)

A couple radio control cars, worked last time I used them, no guarantees but headed to the trash if nobody wants them. Thanks, in Federalsburg.

Pretty straightforward post I think. Here's the email I got later that evening:

the race cars we got from you were junk and dont even run and you said they worked so that was a wasted trip. please dont put junk on hetre that should go to the dump

Well that's nice. Didn't I say that's where I was taking them? When did I guarantee that they worked? So here's what I said:

If you go back to my original message at the bottom it says that I was making no guarantees, they ran the last time I tried to use them.

Reasonably polite on my part. I wasn't going to apologize because I was immediately put on guard because I felt they were being aggressive about this. Here's the reply I got:

LIKE I SAID WHEN U PUT SOMETHING ON HERE MAKE SURE IT WORKS PEOPLE DONT WANT TO DRIVE TO PICK UP JUNK!!!!

Yup, all in caps, now they're yelling at me. I don't appreciate being yelled at when I just *gave* you something. Why is it my job to make sure it works? Didn't I say I didn't know if they worked by putting 'no guarantees' in my email? So I wrote:

You get what you pay for.

Again, everyone knows this and some of the junk I've seen go through freecycle, people will take stuff that doesn't work. Hell, if someone else was giving away rc cars that didn't work, John would've tinkered with them until they did. Not that hard. Here's what they said today:

yeah for real just leave junk and your trash off here

I'm not concerned with getting the last word in here. I haven't written back yet. I'm not sure if I should. I do want to let them know what a wonderful experience freecycle has been and that I hope they aren't making it a point to ruin it for everyone and that they wouldn't have to worry about my junk anymore because I would not give them anything ever again. My junk is good junk, if it deserves to go in the trash it does. However, if they were $100 rc cars, I would've sold them. Thanks for letting me rant, thoughts?