Dear Craigslist Sellers of Sofas,
Please learn to rotate your photos so they’re right side up. I shouldn’t have to visit the chiropractor after looking at your delightful purple sofa.
I would also appreciate it if you could stand back a few feet when you photograph your couch so that I can see more than a part of one arm or a one-foot-wide section of the back. You’re not Annie Leibovitz, I presume (because why would she be in Binghamton trying to sell a sofa?), so a single photo that consists of an artistic close-up of your late grandmother’s “vintage Victorian” couch doesn’t do me any good.
If you live in a home that is approximately the width of a tractor-trailer, standing diagonally across and back from the sofa to take the photo might work. When you don’t include a full-sized picture, I tend to imagine something terrible has happened to your couch on the parts that are hidden. Could there be bodily fluids of some kind staining it? Or a massive rip from when your pit bull ate the arm and a portion of the back? I don’t know. But please don’t leave that to my imagination.
Using a thumbnail photo that’s impossible to magnify and makes it look like your couch came straight from Lilliput is also a poor sales tactic. I will not buy this couch because it will be much too small for me to sit on.
I can also assure you that photographing your sofa in lighting so soft, misty, or dark that it would make Burt Reynolds look like a fresh-faced faunlet will not induce me to buy it. So please, turn on some lights, use a flash, open the curtains, and let me see what the damned couch looks like.
As for you writers of succinct though misspelled, grammatically incorrect, and wildly punctuated descriptions of sofas, who choose to omit a photo, please recognize that no legitimate buyer will purchase a couch unseen. You are asking for crazy people to harass you. Is that what you want? Is your life so empty of meaning and drama that you’re willing to invite strangers to enter it? And you lovers of all CAPS who sound like you’re yelling at me through your ad, calm the hell down! I will not be bullied into buying your couch. You don’t scare me because you are far away and don’t know where I live.
Finally, if your sofa is damaged, stained, beaten up, ugly beyond belief, with cushions as flat and misshapen as an aging porn star’s breasts minus all the silicone, you should put it to the curb or donate it to the Salvation Army, not try to score $50 for it. That’s just being greedy.
Many thanks and best regards,
Angie Pelekidis
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