I don't wait on CL buyers. I live in the city. If someone wants to see something I have for sale, I tell them, "Let's meet at the drugstore at X and Y intersection, or the Home Depot at Z." Then I ask about a meeting time, once that's agreed-upon, I tell them, "I'm right around the corner from there, call me when you're about five minutes away, and I'll be there, waiting on you." That way I don't have to wait on the inconsiderate jerks that tell you, "I'll be there," and never show. You go on with your day, and if they don't call, you had a productive time at home anyway, and there will be a buyer eventually.
I've never had a CL buyer ask me to come to the house when I told them I would meet them at another location. I think the astute buyer recognizes my home is not the trading post where you get to case the joint for a burglary or robbery in a worst-case scenario.
Bad behavior in the shop: not really the shop, but one of life's lessons. I was a young guy, working construction full-time, and I didn't make enough to have a place of my own. I was renting space in an apartment a 'friend of a friend' housing arrangement with one of my construction co-workers. About the only things I kept in the apartment were a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, and a small portable toolbox. One day I came back to the apartment from wherever I was and found the lease-holder on the apartment sitting in his easy chair, watching TV, with a pocketknife in his hands. My toolbox was open, and he had my brand-new Stanley crescent wrench in his hands. It was a model with a dipped-plastic yellow comfort handle. The adult with his knife had a pile of yellow plastic shavings in his lap, he had been whittling-off the plastic covering! Man, I was so taken-aback that someone would be so-stupid to do something like that. For a moment I was just taking it in, and then I went over to his sorry **** in the chair, and I took my now-shorn of plastic handle material crescent wrench from him. I angrily asked him why he would do such a stupid thing, what gave him the right to rummange through my tools, and to deface them? He was lucky I didn't do something else, but I didn't want to go that way. He didn't have a clue why I was or should be upset, just unbelievable. Now, this guy was a union carpenter, He made more than I did, and I couldn't understand how someone could have so-little consideration for another worker's tools. Later he came to me and told me, "you gotta find another place to live," I told him, "I'll be out Friday." I was, and never saw him again, a good thing for him. I still have that crescent wrench, shorn of its yellow flexible plastic. If he had done that to my Wright 'tootsie-roll' handle socket ratchet wrench, I might have been less-willing to control my anger, it was given to me by my parents, along with its socket set when I got my driver's license, so I could do stuff on the family's second car, a VW bug cabriolet they bought new. That was my first quality tool set.
We used to throw some Bike Week parties. A couple we liked from down the street made it a point to come to one or two of them each event. They weren't bikers, but we threw some pretty good parties...
