how does that work anyway?

In between marveling at the going rate of purebred dogs ($9000? Are you kidding?), I discovered that my mother, sisters, grandmother, great aunt, and sister's mother in law and sister's MIL's girlfriend and possibly her family are planning a garage sale in our yard in about a month. And possibly a friend of mine. No, the yard is not that big. No, I have no idea how this is going to work. I mean, from what I've seen? This is a lot of stuff. But OTOH, the existence of spandex does prove that a great deal can in fact be fit into a small, small space.

Normally, this would lead to a fit of horror and discovering an important meeting in a mall somewhere, since nothing disturbs me quite as much as one on one customer service (both the giving and receiving). This is because I once worked retail and quickly realized this was not my true calling. It's also because I'll be required to help.

However, that wasn't my first reaction. My first reaction was office supplies. Colored pens and index cards and separately colored prices to show who has what, but then it hit me--oh, it hit me. After counting up the participants, I realized that this would be a fantastic reason to buy a bar code scanner to keep track of an items' original owner when it is purchased! Would this not be awesome?

I also had a fairly long fantasy of how I'd develop a multipage Excel spreadsheet to track going price and final price per item as well as what sold fastest and what sold the slowest. Last night, I started looking at the extra space on my domain and pondering the fact that I could totally write something up to use to keep track of money and items in HTML and work on uploading all scans to give everyone a complete list of a.) what was sold b.) what the price was and c.) who originally owned it. My favorite part was going to be the happy days I spent barcoding everything and then putting it into categories (toys, shoes, clothes, get-rid-of-this-at-any-cost, candles, books, wtf-people-would-buy-this, etc).

For reasons beyond my understanding, they totally nixed the bar code scanner idea, and I really want this.

True fact about my mother (and family): in all the years she has known me, she has yet to pick up one sure thing. I will participate in eight hours of something I hate if I get one hour of something I really, really love. If I get to bar code everything, I will totally sit there all day and gleefully work the yard selling stuff because that means I get to play with the scanner! And between times, I will get to make obscure bar graphs tracking absolutely pointless information regarding what was sold that is not only useless but that no one but me will ever a.) care about or b.) even know exists. I just--how is this not obvious? I even showed her my obsessive del.icio.us tagging to try and illustrate how important this is for my mental health and happiness. No go.

I was also forbidden to run out and buy one myself, which is just salt in the wound.

People confuse me. It is a bar code scanner! It's like taking away my new pony. Before I even got it.