Truffling about among the discs and the lessons learned.

The task of the month is to get Mr Footless's  incredible selection of Vinyl down to the good stuff so that if there is salable good stuff it can be sold.  This has a two ton emotional load riding on it, and I have been avoiding it for the better part of a year.
Well, closing down my office has been a tipping point for starting this.  Now I need the space taken up by the boxes.
I had a really hard time even going down to the basement.  When I actually gathered my courage and went down there I counted the boxes and was nearly floored.  What I was looking at was thirty two boxes of unsorted vinyl which I had been assured had some very valuable pieces in it.  How on earth was I going to find those bits among the boxes I had no idea.
Then I got a call from my Bestie.  She had in mind a three way barter, and offered me the services of her housemate in return for cash off his rent.  So suddenly I had intelligent  muscle with no emotional investment in the vinyl.  Last week he came over and we ripped through all the boxes doing first a rough sort and then a more carefully considered sort of the collection.  We sent five full boxes out to the world.  We mentally labeled them WTF, Please God no you have to be kidding, OK was he drunk, stoned or constipated or any combination of the three? and If that is what made it to the album cover, what does the rest of the photo shoot look like?
By day three, we had a much thinned better categorized selection of vinyl with a big box of what might be albums with some real value in them.  Both of us were much more able to assess what we were looking for, and so we went through the dead boxes once more and pulled some ten albums that might be more salable than we thought.  Then I took the rest down to the local record dealer to have him do a final sort to see what we missed. 
The record dealer was rootling about in them there boxes and he looks at me and says in a slightly accusing voice, "You aren't bringing me your good ones are you?
So I explained that I was bringing him the grossly unsaleable herd first, and his was the very last stop before the donation bin to see what I might have missed, and to sharpen my eye by seeing what he pulled from the dreck.  He nods his head.  He says, "That makes some sense, It is just that most people bring me the valuable stuff first."
I know how most people sell their stuff.  It happens a lot in the Antique business, I know why not to do it.  It would go like this; Joe Schmoe would bring in his piece. We would research it, and pay him a fair price for it, which would be much more than he expected.  Then Joe would come in with increasingly less fine stuff and expect that we would pay him the same sort of prices. Which we would not, it was less fine stuff, more common, poorer shape, not something the market wanted.  Joe Schmoe had his expectations blown way out of shape by that first sale. He got upset because in his eyes, the later stuff had the same value as the first stuff. It never does.
This record guy is in a business. He needs to make a profit, he is not going to waste space on unsalable items.  I have a collection of vinyl that has huge numbers of waste of space items and some few actually worthwhile pieces.
 Letting him have the last stop check through before I sent these pieces off to donation clears my deck and lets him understand that I may have more and better goodies. He pulls some things out that I might not have considered worthwhile and explains why I should  look at those things, He pays me some cash and we are both pleased.  He will be paying attention when I roll up with a box or two of slightly better quality, because he now understands that I know what I am doing. I have been checking his methods, his eye, his business sense, and his honesty. So far he has passed all the tests. He is someone I can do business with.