Day 28 - speculate to accumulate

Today might not be the most exciting day in book-or-blog-ville.  The reason for this is that I might be spending my day writing other stuff... eBay auctions.


It's a bit of a lottery, eBay, and it can be quite annoying.  I've only ever had two negative feedbacks, for instance, but they were very annoying indeed and I suspect that the dip below 100% on my rating will now hit my sales quite significantly.  Here's the story...



Last November, as part of a clearout and to make a bit of extra cash for Christmas, I figured I'd sell some of my stuff that wasn't getting used. Some of my XBox 360 games fell into that category, and they say you don't miss what you haven't had.  Among these games were Assassin's Creed 1 & 2.

Bastard games, costing me unwarranted negative feedback.  At least I did sell them, eventually.

I was contacted by a "buyer", who asked if they could pay in person, in cash, as they didn't have a Paypal account. The auction clearly stated Paypal only, but as the buyer said they lived locally (depsite their profile saying otherwise) they said they could collect. I was wary, and in fact I let them know that due to my working patterns this would be difficult. They insisted they could pick the games up from me at any time, so I reluctantly agreed that, should they win, they could collect them from me.


They won.


I should have known things would go wrong when the buyer contacted me to say "cheers for the games, let me know when I can get them and, oh, put a SCART lead in there for me".
This puzzled me. I wasn't selling a SCART lead in any of my other auctions, and I'd made no mention of one in any of my eBay auctions, ever. What's more, I didn't even have a spare SCART lead. I told the person this and they said "Oh OK, no worries then, just bring the games". Well, yeah... you do tend to only give people the stuff they've bought, after all...


I let the person know that, as I'd previously stated, I had no idea when I would be able to meet up with them to complete the transaction, due to my working patterns. They told me that this was OK, they would wait. They asked again a few days later if I still wanted to sell them the games... then the next thing I knew, they'd left me negative feedback for both games.


I asked if they would revise the negative feedback, on account of how they hadn't actually paid any money for the items that they hadn't yet received. I offered to work something out with them, and was told this was fine and that they had revised my feedback. To this day, the negatives remain... my only negatives... and I heard nothing further. Maybe I should have given them the free SCART lead after all...

I really liked using this phone, actually...

So, eBay is a bit of a curate's egg for me.  Usually my dealings are fine, and so I'm about to venture onto there once more.  "But whyyyy?", I hear you ask?  Well, I need to have a clearout again, for one thing.  I've got a small boy who needs his bedroom back, and as that room is being used as a storage facility for my tat right now, some of it needs to go.


I also need to accumulate a bit of cash for the book.  You see, even though I'm only in the very early stages, I'm already thinking about its presentation and layout.  And to that end, Open Office and Paint Shop Pro won't cut it.  I'm going to need to buy some Adobe software...


That's a big commitment, because those programs aren't cheap, at all.  But I'm fully committed to this, so I want to do it properly.  Of course, I'll be downloading a trial when I buy my new laptop, just to experiment and see how it all feels, but really, that's the way forward.  I'll need a few hundred pounds... unless somebody fancies being a "sponsor" or something.  I can't imagine that would happen, so it's out with the old.  Anybody want to buy a used Blackberry, or an X-Arcade?