Freecycle Diaries: Am I falling out of love?

In the third instalment of the Freecycle Diaries, Natasha Lomas finds herself falling out of love with the web giveaway service - after receiving faulty gifts and being stood up.

Does goodwill have a shelf life? Should helpfulness have limits?

It's been a week or so and my relationship with Freecycle has gone through the rose-tinted, doe-eyed, isn't-it-wonderful stage and is beginning to come out the other side. How it evolves from here, remains to be seen.

The first sour note is a realisation that, on closer inspection, the packing boxes I gained from a fellow Freecycler really are mostly a load of old cardboard - there's about one viable box in the whole pile. The rest are either too big or heavy-duty to be carried by one person or too flimsy to hold more than a few sheets of paper. In short: it's basically junk. Is this the beginning of the end of the affair? Am I falling out of love with Freecycle so soon?

It's not just the boxes - riding the enthusiasm wave I responded to a 'Wanted' posting.

Someone was looking for "a wooden toy box / blanket box". I have just such a box that I no longer need, so I fire off a quick email. "That'd be fab - thanks a million!" comes the reply, with the poster promising to "give you a call and try and come round one evening this week".

The week goes by without a phone call, and then finally on Saturday morning my mobile rings. Turns out the box-seeker is going away for a week and can I hold onto it for him until next weekend?

Patience, is, it seems, the second commandment of this digital microcosm.

But it's not all been trying times. In an attempt to take the measure of the Freecycle community, I compose a rather unusual offering: "Large collection of colour print-outs of matchbox labels". These proofs are from a book I worked on. They might, to the untrained eye, look rather like a stack of used printer paper. Yet I'm reluctant to cart them off to the recycling bank since they are good quality colour print-outs and could be useful to someone interested in design.

I post my message and wait.

Within minutes I have a taker. Dimitris says he is "interested", adding: "I'm a film editor and I can use that to create artwork videos. That's one reason. The second reason is to put some on the wall for decoration."

We arrange a collection time the following evening.

At about 8 o'clock the doorbell rings and it's a leather-jacket clad, long-haired Dimitris, clutching a few random items - presumably bounty from other Freecyclers - to which I add a Tesco carrier bag of matchbox proofs. "Do you know you have given me an idea," he offers as he's about to depart. "I think I'm going to make a documentary about Freecycle."

Now there's an idea.

Natasha Lomas will be keeping a Freecycle diary over the coming weeks - follow her progress on silicon.com. Read the first and second instalment.