As a student, I have two passions: not spending money on things and being on my computer for 11 hours a day. My favourite place on the internet is the West Point Grey Buy Nothing group.
You can find all kinds of free shit there — or at least be entered into a raffle to duke it out with 15 of your neighbors for a stack of tupperware. For the enviable price of $0, you can get anything from a broken bed frame (don’t think too hard about it) to a literal biblical swarm of locusts (yeah, it ate all the grains in my pantry and my hamster, but it was free).
But there is one issue with this vibrant and generous community, and I’m ready to break my silence.
Dear guy on the West Point Grey Buy Nothing Group: nobody fucking wants your collection of haunted political science textbooks from 1972.
My rigorous coursework (I’m a double major in psychology and reverse psychology) doesn’t leave me a lot of time to shop, so I monitor the Buy Nothing group like a hawk for necessities like sidewalk chalk and vanilla gogurt.
But your daily posts offering the opportunity to enter draws for textbooks — on subjects I don’t think really exist — are cluttering my feed.
“Policy and Governance in Dad Rock” ? “Horse Divorce Court: Theory and Practice” ? “Psychology 101”?
The fact that 20+ people comment with interest on every post doesn’t mean there’s any real demand for these suspiciously-stained scam textbooks. People are just so desperate for free shit they’ll comment on anything! Or maybe they’re just trying to make you feel better. Either way, the books will end up in the trash, where they belong.
So please stop running complicated raffles to select the lucky bastard that gets “Research Methods in Civic Engagement for Ghosts (15th Edition)” or “Behavioral Psychology” or whatever.
While I’m at it, nobody wants your heirloom watch (we have phones to keep time!), vintage Louis Vuitton pumps (gross) or your adorable “Siamese” foster kittens (racist?).
I sincerely hope, for your sake, that your bogus textbooks find a loving home. I hope that you have one too, but based on your Buy Nothing Group superposter status, I somehow doubt it.
Sorry, the textbook market is rough out here. Nobody wants books anymore — especially when profs like my swindling PSYC 101 instructor are charging $1 billion cash money dollars for a book they wrote.
In fact, shoot, I could maybe even be convinced to take a PSYC 101 textbook off your hands — as an act of goodwill towards a fellow member of our beautiful zero waste community.
Nobody actually wants that book, which you happen to be giving away, for free! So can I have it?
This Facebook post is a research project for PSYC 201B: Directed Studies in Reverse Psychology. Interacting with this post in any way represents consent for anonymized inclusion in academic research, and commitment to donating your psychology textbooks to the researcher.