I just got an email that really annoyed me.

Somebody posted to a listserv that I'm on, saying that s/he (I'm not being vague for anonymity... it was an androgynous name) had won a pair of very expensive tickets to Kooza, the Cirque du Soleil production that just opened here in Philadelphia. Unable to use the tickets him/herself, the emailer offered them to the first interested party—for full face value.

This, boys and girls, is worse than re-gifting. Because at least when you're re-gifting, there's at least the assumption that the person on the receiving end doesn't know that you didn't actually buy a gift. But why make an announcement to a few hundred people saying: "I got something for nothing, now give me money for it so I can profit"? Surely, you didn't write that email intending to come across as an asshole.

I get free tickets to stuff all the time. The entire Phillyist staff does. We don't get paid for this gig, so it's the only remuneration we can expect. But we don't then turn around and sell those tickets, no matter how in-demand they are. Why? Because that would be wrong. And because they're usually printed $0.00, so the recipients would know that they were getting ripped off. And okay, there's also that bit where we're supposed to write reviews of the shows we go to see. But mostly, we don't sell our comps because we're not assholes. Of course, should we decide to be assholes and sell our tickets (note to the Phillyist staff: do not ever sell your tickets), we probably wouldn't go around announcing that we didn't have to pay for them in the first place.

That's like going to a wedding and, instead of subtly slipping your re-gifted toaster onto the gift pile, going up to the bride and groom and saying: "We bought you a toaster. Well, 'bought' isn't the right word. We're giving you a toaster. It's the one that my cousins-in-law gave us for our wedding. But since we already had a toaster, we didn't need it. So we're giving it to you, because we were too cheap to buy anything off your registry. I mean, Crate and Barrel? Come on! Why couldn't you register at Target like everybody else? Anyway, toast in good health."

And you're better than that, right?

So next time, if you really want to sell your free tickets, don't mention that they were free and you stand to make a $400 profit from them. Just say that you have tickets that you won't be using and that you'd like to sell. Or admit to getting them for free, but offer to trade them, whether over your listserv or on the Craigslist barter section, for something of similar value. Or keep doing what you've been doing, and run the risk of being the subject of a manners column on Phillyist. Your choice.

Image via Flickr user Hryckowian.