I love classifieds. I’m sort of addicted to them. My wife will tell you that I look at the Pennysaver religiously every Thursday. I scan the DC/Baltimore Craigslist every day for…stuff, stuff I can’t afford but sure would like. I had a brief dream of buying my bride a used Miata for an anniversary present (you laugh, but they’re pretty cheap) until I remembered that the Ireland trip is still being paid off and a new bed is much more important.

Yesterday, I found an ad for a $700 used 3/4 upright bass. I played upright bass for about ten years and put it down when I went to college, always hoping I’d be able to pick another one up someday. This morning, I went out and took a look at it, hoping for some reason not to want to buy it. I picked it up, felt the familiar balance and weight, and years of practice came back to me. It looked pretty good; it had a nice deep tone. The action was good; the strings felt like they had life, and the fingerboard was pretty smooth. Closer inspection revealed a cracked neck at the top of the body (it looked like it had split clean through, and the owner told me it had been repaired with a steel rod by a luthier in Annapolis) and a bunch of chips around the edges. There were two bows, both German (a good sign) and they felt pretty good, if not bent a little too much.

I’m really having a hard time knowing what to do here; I’d offer $550 for the whole thing, knowing the neck is split, but I’m having a hard time justifying the cost when we have so much other stuff going on. Plus, I have an electric bass that I don’t get to play at all, given my current schedule.

I hate classifieds.

A couple of years ago, I bought some used iMacs from a guy who, in hindsight, probably pinched them off a truck somewhere. The deal was great, and based on some fortuitous timing, I resold one and recouped the cost of all three. Having an extra machine to tinker with was good, and I put it to work as a music server and low-cost backup for my MP3 collection. I wound up bringing it to work and quietly advised some friends to download a copy of iTunes and take advantage of the library streaming feature.

Since that time, our company has grown to the point where there are twice as many employees, and word of my music collection leaked out. At one point, I was organizing a group of fellow music lovers to buy a used server and consolidate our assorted collections into one big library, but as the number of people expanded and the RIAA got more litigious, I decided to back away from the idea. (Dear corporate lawyers: I’m above board, and I don’t fileshare.)

These days, an interesting phenomena has occurred: new iTunes libraries are popping up inside the company. Some days there are as many as seven or eight, but usually we average about five. There are some gems in there, like the collection of Lewis Black recordings, or the guy that has seven Charlie Parker albums I haven’t heard, or the Metallica back catalog, or those killer Stevie Ray Vaughan bootlegs. But mostly, it’s one or two Pink songs, follwed by the entire Final Fantasy catalog (apparently there is one guy who only writes music for these stupid games), and then some band called Finger Eleven. New rule: your band immediately sucks if you have a number in the name. Three Doors Down. Third Eye Blind. Seven Mary Three. Eve 6. Echo7. These names tell me that the major music labels have a computer program that spits out dumb generic names, like the Pentagon’s “Operation” namer. Also, Linkin Park just sucks, and no amount of whining by that annoying lead singer guy will convince me otherwise.

I do wish people would name their tracks something other than “TRACK_1”, though. Spending some quality time being anal about metadata would be helpful, so I could make an informed choice about listening to a collection of Manga soundtracks or Bible chapters or muddy Evanescence live recordings. (No, no, and definitely not.) I suppose not everybody is as obsessive-compulsive about this as me, but I’m proud of the fact that 98% of the stuff I’ve got is correctly tagged so that searching provides useable results.

It’s funny, though, to see the variations in collections throughout the company. Scrolling through the lists yields the odd REO Speedwagon tune you hoped you’d forgotten, or a block of the Monkees, or a mislabeled Johnny Cash tune, or half the Footloose Soundtrack, or a whole library of hair metal.

Good times.