Death of a Newspaper
We are having a garage sale this weekend! The traditional rigamorole for doing a garage sale is to prep your stuff and then go down to the newspaper (the Times-Colonist). You are supposed to stand in a line-up of advertisers and wait for the first available window. Place your ad and people will come in droves. Hooray!
Today, I went to the Classifieds department of the TC. There are two wickets for classifieds-- one was closed. The other one had the only other customer there: an elderly woman showing off pictures of her cats. Eventually, she figured out that I was waiting and she took her cat pictures home. I stepped up. I wanted my ad to simply read the address, what we're selling and the hours. Nope. They gave me three lines to say what I wanted, but they insisted-- INSISTED-- that the ad starts with "Victoria." The "Victoria" ads are all lumped under a sub-heading of "Victoria", so why have line-after-line repeat the same phrase? I said, "That's fine-- I'll just post it on UsedVictoria and Craigslist and save myself the $20." The poor girl behind the counter sheepishly nodded and said, "Sure, that's understandable." Tonight, as I write this, I thought: let's check if I can place the ad I want via the online version of the TC. Bing! Yes, I can with a few twists:
Today, I went to the Classifieds department of the TC. There are two wickets for classifieds-- one was closed. The other one had the only other customer there: an elderly woman showing off pictures of her cats. Eventually, she figured out that I was waiting and she took her cat pictures home. I stepped up. I wanted my ad to simply read the address, what we're selling and the hours. Nope. They gave me three lines to say what I wanted, but they insisted-- INSISTED-- that the ad starts with "Victoria." The "Victoria" ads are all lumped under a sub-heading of "Victoria", so why have line-after-line repeat the same phrase? I said, "That's fine-- I'll just post it on UsedVictoria and Craigslist and save myself the $20." The poor girl behind the counter sheepishly nodded and said, "Sure, that's understandable." Tonight, as I write this, I thought: let's check if I can place the ad I want via the online version of the TC. Bing! Yes, I can with a few twists:
- I can place the ad for free.
- If I pay $30 or $40, I have to put my neighbourhood at the start; if I do not pay for it, I do not have this limitation.
- It has to run for 14 day (so we will have a garage sale ad lingering for 11 days after the sale.) Keep that in mind, the next time you go to the TC for an ad: there's a cluster dead ads and a couple live soldiers hiding amongst the bodies.
- They send you a username/password for a Canada.com account.
- You can change your password, but you cannot login with the account and password.
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