Saturday Musings - Why My Wife is Smarter Than Me!

Today was a big day for the whole family. You see, today was the day that Roselyn decided to get rid of a lot of our junk by having a garage sale. A garage sale is where you get all the stuff you’ve collected over the years, dump it in the driveway. You then hope that passers-by want to part with some cash and take it off your hands.

I slept fitfully the night before the grand event so when the alarm went off at 7am this morning two things happened. My wife got up and I thought it was the end of the world. Seriously, I doubt that even God’s awake at 7am on a Saturday morning…..but I was wrong about that. You see, God had arranged for a host of buyers to be waiting out the front of the house at 8am, even though we’d explicitly said that the grand bazaar would commence at 9am.

So after emptying the contents of our garage into the driveway, the “fun” of haggling with buyers over a couple of dollars for something that I would just as happily given to them commenced.

The problem was that my honour was at stake. Why give something away when you can have so much more fun negotiating with a complete stranger. There’s nothing quite like honing your bargaining skills over an old packet of light bulbs to see if you still have what it takes to get a good deal.

At one stage, I found myself in the odd predicament of digging in my heels by refusing to come down from $17 to $16 for something that I was actually prepared to put in the garbage can. In the heat of the tussle between the buyer and myself that $1 seemed so important. In hindsight, what amazed me was that the buyer was willing to pay anything for the items!

As the day wore on we continued to accumulate a vast wealth in sales. When the clock finally struck 3pm (thank goodness) we spent the next hour cleaning up and then went inside to count the treasure. Our day’s effort resulted in just over $200 and our kids sold another $150.

I was initially a little despondent. I felt like I had done so well negotiating to extract the best deals possible. I then looked at my wife’s jubilant face as she carefully deposited the proceeds into our “holiday fund”.

“It’s not going to get us very far,” I said a bit dejectedly.

“What do you mean?” she answered.

“For the holiday.”

“Oh, I don’t care about the holiday fund…..I just care that the garage got cleaned up.”

Doh!!!!! I’d been conned! Here I was thinking I was embarking on some great business venture and Roselyn had managed to swindle me into cleaning up the garage on the pretence of an entrepreneurial activity! She knows me way to well….LOL!

So what did I learn from today’s venture? For a start, I learned that there are a whole group of muscles in my lower back that I didn’t know I had. Junk is only junk if no one wants to buy it. Balloons tied to power poles combined with a hundred hastily printed off brochures to stuff into letterboxes is an awesome marketing campaign.

Most importantly, Roselyn is way smarter than me!

Cheers!

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.