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May 15, 2006
Dibs dibser dibsest
What are your thoughts on dibs? Yesterday had a sour note, thanks to a mysterious interloper who doesn't think much of them. Here is my tale of woe and crankiness: Josh arrived home from work with the news that there was a table downstairs, not in the trash area, where people usually pile their "I moved out oh god look at all this crap" trash, but in the mailbox area, where people less frequently leave furniture they're getting rid of.
So I went to look at the table, and lo! Now there were two tables, and some shelves, and a plant. One of the tables was just the thing to replace our current coffee "table," really some crates and some laminate shelves and some duct tape. It was a good size! It was not offensively hideous! It had a shelf underneath to store crap and to hold fat cats! What was lacking was a note indicating whether this bounty was free, or waiting for a truck to arrive to load it into, or what. I lurked around for awhile, and there was no sign of activity. Still, not wanting to be presumptuous, fearing the possibility that I might add a layer of panic to someone's moving day, I affixed a note to the table:
"Is this stuff free? If so, Apt. XX calls dibs on this table!"
A couple of hours later, I figured that the time limit for unattended furnishings had elapsed, and went back to check on the coffee table I'd of course decided was mine. And, of course, some bastard took it! Not all the stuff, just some, including my clearly-dibbed table. The nerve! The worst part is, you can just imagine what this person thought of my little note, my pathetic attempt to mark my territory. They thought nothing of flouting dibs. They mocked my dibs!
So I think this is lame, especially because I was trying to cover all the bases, to be nice. Next time such an ambiguous situation presents itself, I will no doubt be tempted to greedily grab, before some dibs-impaired person gets to it first.
What would you do if you found a dibbsed piece of furniture? Does dibs count here? Would you take it regardless, because it's an unkind world and you have to look out for yourself? Is dibs presumptuous in the case of the free stuff pile?
Posted by hilatron at 01:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack