Let me set the scene – it’s a hot New Orleans Wednesday afternoon, and my fiancee Kate and I are lazing in our hotel room bed when a knock comes on the door.
Knock knock. Knock knock.
We ignore it, because we clearly have the “please do not disturb” sign on our door handle, and the door is deadbolted shut.
Knock knock. Knock knock.
“Go away!” I yell, from our comfortable bed.
Knock knock. “Housekeeping!”
“We’re fine! We don’t need anything!”
Knock knock. “Housekeeping!”
As I start to wake up from my haze of half-sleep, I realize that housekeeping has already been to our room once today. Plus which, Kate and I have the do not disturb sign on the door for a reason – and get your perverted minds out of the gutter! Kate was hit by a particularly nasty case of bronchitis on our first night down here, and has been on a course of antibiotics ever since.
Knock knock. “Housekeeping!”
You’d think after two minutes of knocking and being rebuffed, the housekeeper would give up. I lumber over to the door and glance out the peep-hole. It’s the housekeeper, all right.
Knock knock. Knock knock.
“What do you want?”
“Housekeeping!” Knock knock. “I’ve got towels!” Knock knock.
I twist my head to the side and look into the bathroom. On the rack are eight freshly-pressed towels, waiting for our bathing and poolside drying needs.
“We’ve already got towels. Can you please go away?”
Knock knock. “Washcloths!”
I notice that we are, in fact, missing the two small hand-towels from our linen assortment.
Knock knock. “Housekeeping! Washcloths!”
“We don’t want the washcloths! Bring them back tomorrow.”
Knock. “Are” knock “you” knock “Sure sir?” knock knock knock.
“YES! Let me get back to sleep!”
Knock knock. “Okay! See you tomorrow.”
This tops off a string of vacations that Kate and I have taken that have ended up with one of us sick, incapacitated, dead, or some combination of the three. When we visited my Mom for Thanksgiving, we made a stopover at Kate’s Aunt’s house first. There, I got hit by a really nasty 24-hour flu that was going around her Aunt’s jogging club that week. Before that vacation, we visited my dad in Oregon – and he had every single minute of every day planned out, in such a way that we literally had no downtime the entire trip. Let’s see – Myrtle Beach before that, the flu. California before that – Kate’s allergies were fierce from having lived in a house with mold and cats for a year.
Given that yesterday was Kate’s birthday, at least she was feeling well enough to go out for a nice hibachi dinner. Remember when Jamie Wakefield asked everyone to send birthday wishes to Wendy? Well, let’s try this the Bleiweiss way: If you’d like to wish Kate a happy birthday, e-mail her at [email protected] and maybe a deluge of happy birthday messages will help her kick the bronchitis out of her lungs.
What’s all of this have to do with Magic? Well, sometimes you sign up for something, and get a little extra. In this case, we signed up for a nice, relaxing week in New Orleans, and ended up with a case of bronchitis, and an overly zealous maid. I have literally thousands upon thousands of buys coming through StarCityGames.com each year, and sometimes I get “a little bit extra” then what I’m expecting.
Before I go into details, let me state for the record that I appreciate each and every person who takes the time to come to a show, come to our shop, or mails us in cards to sell the business. I do my best to give everyone my full time and attention, and the following stories are meant only as humorous anecdotes.
So, what’s the #1 extra bonus we get when buying collections? That would be hair. Without fail, if a collection contains at least 1,000 cards in it, there’s bound to be a hair in the collection. Now, I’m not the squeamish type – I know that people are going to shed, and that it’s not particularly unsanitary to have a hair in a box of cards. By the same token, I know it’s not my hair, because I’m as bald as a lepromatous alligator. Now that I think of it, I really should have saved all those hairs – I would have had one bitchin’ toupee to wear.
People often ask me, “what’s the largest collection you’ve ever gotten.” This varies if you’re talking about dollar amount, or actual number of cards. While I can’t give specifics, let’s just say that we’ve had to rent U-Haul trucks for collections. Now, if you asked me “Which collection has been the hardest to process, ever?” I have a clear winner – the Minnesota collection.
I forget the name of the guy who sent us the collection, but I do remember that he was an extremely nice gentleman. He was looking to sell his entire Magic collection, but claimed that his cards were all out of order. As is usual, we offered to take in his collection through the mail, go through everything, and give him an appraisal. He asked for recommendations on the best method to ship, and I told him to go through UPS Ground or Fedex Ground, so he could insure and track the package – but to be careful, because 150 pounds is the absolute weight limit on any package.
A week later, the collection arrived. There were six boxes of 125 pounds each. When I opened up the first one, I couldn’t believe my eyes – the cards in the box were in no order. And by “in no order”, I don’t mean “the cards were in long-boxes, sorted in no discernable method”, I mean “the cards were loose in the box, flipped every which way, and were not sorted in any discernable method.” All six boxes were in a similar state. In short, I had close to seven-hundred and fifty pounds of Magic cards in a complete state of disarray, all of which needed to be gone through for pricing.
Now, it would be easy enough if patterns emerged while going through the collection, but truth be told there were none. If I grabbed a handful of 50 cards, I could literally get an assortment of Library of Alexandria, Cunning, Skyshroud Elite, two different Homorids, ten basic lands, a Sakura-Tribe Elder, two 7th Edition Twiddles, and other randomness. This was quite a good collection, and by the time I got through it, it priced up at a very high total. However, it took two weeks for me to get all the cards back in order and priced. When I say two weeks, I mean that I would wake up at 7am, sort the cards at home for three hours, head into work, go through the cards for eight more hours, take another large section of the collection home, sort it until I fell asleep, wake up, and repeat.
In the process of going through the collection, we came across all sorts of weird memorabilia. In addition to Magic cards, there were the old abacus-style Duelist life counters, Inquest life counters, dice, tokens, miniatures (as in Warhammer), and an old-prom photo. This joined my collection of custom-cards people have made (including ones I have for “Jaws,” “Circle of Protection: Loser,” and “Swamp Elemental Blast”), several DCI membership cards (Evan Erwin, I’m looking at you!), a social security card, and a couple of scabs.
Admittedly, I didn’t keep the scabs.
I think that no buy will ever shock me more than a guy who was selling us a complete set of everything from Arabian Nights forward. He had packaged his collection in binders, and shipped us seven boxes – six of them had complete sets, and one box has his remaining play-cards, including a Lotus and several Mox. On the day the collection arrived, we received eight boxes. Okay, fair enough – I opened up the first box, and staring me in the face, and in the nose, was a used portable toilet from an airplane.
Used.
Toilet.
I quickly closed the box and called our UPS Representative. As it turns out, there was a company that was supposed to have the toilet returned to them a couple weeks back, but somehow that package had been lost, and added to our seller’s shipment. We did manage to sort out that mess, and the rest of the collection was just fine – but to this day, I’m still a bit wary about opening up any collections that people have boxed up in their leftover Huggies containers.
See you all next week!