Be Excellent To Each Other

Last week I popped my old laptop onto Ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=200246217306&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT&ih=010

Perfectly normal procedure and I've sold loads of stuff on Ebay before. However in the past few days I've had 5 people email me asking to sell it direct to them and 2 foriegners living abroad asking pretty much the same thing (which makes them twice as bad as it was supposed to be a UK only auction unless I've cocked up).

With each person I've explained the concept of an auction to them and the fact few things on Ebay piss me off than people withdrawing items mid-auction. I've also explained that I'm not going to post the laptop to Portugal/Latvia.

Are these people scammers? Or is it that laptop auctions just attract idiots? I'm aware that the laptop is fairly tidy for it's age ,boxed , and has been "pimped" but does that happen for everyone else? Anyone else had this happen to them?

I've got two other auctions going on at the moment and it's business as usual.

And can we have a new angry man Dimlie please?

Yes.

I suspected as much. I did take the preacaution of only allowing Paypal for payment + budgeting for Parcelforce for the delivery (who have a track and trace system + insurance so I can prove delivery).

Although two people did offer to collect it in person, but I'm still wary with that as well.

If it fails to meet the reserve I might try the local paper instead. I set a reserve so I get back something approaching it's value. Considering the money it's had spent on it with new memory, new HD I want to recoup something. You still couldn't get something anywhere near that spec for far more.

There is a way of restricting the auction so that only UK-registered users can bid on it, but I can't remember how to do this or if you can change it mid-auction.

I had to do it when I was selling something similar on eBay and was being plagued by scam artists.

Well it says I will only post to the UK. And I've now put a warning in big red letters down the bottom telling Johnny Foriegner and the scammers to get knotted.

40 odd people watching the auction which freaks me out as I now suspect a large number of them are scammers.

This has happend to me. Not to be judgemental or owt, but it's those fucking nigerians again, most of the time. Whenever I've sold a laptop of any kind, a whole bunch of nigerian bastards have emailed me offering me the asking price + £100 and all other kind of bollocks. Some have 'bought it now' and then sent fake 'You've received money' Paypal notices, or used a genetic, fake, escrow email saying 'Nigerian Cuntface has deposited £1000 of fake non existant money for you to collect, SEND ITEM NOW!!!!'.

To all of these I've replied in extremely offensive and racist ways, being as insulting as humanly possible. I mean seriously, Nigeria, FUCK OFF WITH YOUR SCAMS.

I wish you'd been with me at the petrol station last night.

Here's email I sent Total:



"Sirs,

I've been a longstanding customer of the Total service station at xxx for many years

This afternoon I was in the xxx service station when the tills started to have a problem processing credit cards. After several attempts to pay the assistant informed me that there was something wrong with my card, despite it being quite clear that the system was failing (the lady being served on the other till had exactly the same problem).

By this time a queue had formed behind both tills, it was quite apparent that the card system had gone down. I advised the sales assistant that I would run to the supermarket 400 yards up the road to get cash and that it might be wise to post someone on the forecourt to warn people who wished to pay on card before they started to fill-up. This would prevent people being faced with the embarrassment of not being able to pay as well as prevent queues.

When I returned from the supermarket the queues were larger and the customers more frustrated. The man who had been behind me in the queue was still trying to get his own card to go through the system. Like me he had no alternative way to pay.

I again advised the sales assistant who served me (the youngest person working that day) to post someone on the forecourt to warn people but was met with a stonewall of "If we do that we will be slower serving". I pointed out that there were only two tills but three members of staff on duty but this did no good whatsoever.

I paid in cash and as I left the sales assistant said to me "Do come again sir". This was uncalled for as it was his "don't care" attitude that had led me to voice my frustration in front of the considerable queue (many of whom vocally supported what I said).

Was it to much to ask that the sales assistants could have used their common sense to advise people before they started to fill-up there was a problem with the card payment system? There were three staff on duty and only two tills so I cannot see why this would be a problem.

I'll now be using Shell at yyyy instead. I pass up and down the Axx two or three times a week and spend well over £1500 a year at the xxx Total garage (and have done for the last 8 years or so). No longer I'm afraid.

Thank you."

Am I turning into Victor Meldrew?

Not bad, but I'd be more impressed if you'd taken a pickaxe and introduced it to the face of said assistant. Also, pics or it didn't happen.

Some people are just morons, even in the face of good advice.

Yes. Give it another year, and you'll be Alf Garnett.

Probably. I think it's the weather personally.

What I didn't like was the way the assistant implicated I had insufficient funds in my account to pay for the transaction when it was blatantly obvious it was their system. Even me running 400 yards up the road to the Tesco Express to get cash was met with an indifference.

For a business where you have effectively taken the goods before you get chance to pay, you'd think they'd have a procedure in place rather than let people fill up knowing full well that if their system goes down unless they have cash they can't pay.

And to be fair I wasn't so much angry as totally gobsmacked that the staff didn't appear to have two brain cells between them.

Reasons I always pay at pump +1.

Pay at pump? They'd burn you for witchcraft if you tried that where I was!

Morrisons in Shrewsbury have just refitted their petrol station to use new pumps and they have a "pay at pump" option which is very nice indeed.

However, the hateful cretins that designed these new pumps have designed the nozzles in such a way that it's almost impossible to get it into the tank at an angle that DOESN'T cause the auto-shutoff system to kick in after about 3 seconds. Filling up now takes about three times as long, and short of guessing at how many litres you can get into your tank based on what's already in it, there's no reliable way of knowing when to stop.

Well, apart from when you get wet shoes, natch.

eBay, eh kids? I gave up selling games on eBay when some of my PAL region games ended up being bought by Americans, who had no idea that they had bid in a currency other than Sterling*, and less of an idea that the game discs wouldn't run on their NTSC consoles...

I did sell some non-game items for a while, but even setting auctions to UK-only, I got troublesome buyers. Like a Chinese person who wanted the massively expensive and rare Transformers figure he had just won sent to an unconfirmed address in China. (His eBay account was supposedly a UK one.) That was a massive headache. I've since discovered that a good way of deterring overseas bidders is to set the postage option(s) for outside the UK to Royal Mail AirSure, which is so expensive when you factor in the strong Pound that it does seem to work. Then again, admittedly I'm not selling something like a laptop PC.

* ("No, you can't pay for an auction win worth £35 with US$35, it doesn't work like that.")

When I sold my old mobile on eBay a few years ago some cunt who wasn't in the UK won, and gave a Netherlands address. I figured I'd go for this, but the cunt then insisted that I send it to their mother, who was - you guessed it - in Nigeria. I politely advised them to go fuck themselves, informed eBay, and had to fucking relist the item as the second highest bidder didn't respond when I offered it to them instead.

So, I agree with you when I say (apart from their sweet, light crude) Nigeria can fuck off and get AIDS.

.

not

Fucking aiders.

Is it any less bad if I only invite Nigerian scam fuckers to get AIDS?

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Some people also work for the minimum wage and can't give a flying fuck either way.

Don't expect Ivy service down at Happy Eater.

AIDS is the cure for eBay scammers.

B-but... some people asked him slightly annoying questions on eBay.

It's rather sad that the instinctual reaction to negative stimuli by many members of this board is to steam straight over here and impotently wish death on people.

I wish unpleasant things on people who are setting out to try and commit a crime against me. That is all.

The Happy Eater was aces. A more appropriate saying would be "Don't expect Happy Eater service at a Little Chef".

Jesus, someone says that an entire country (mostly populated by black people) should die from a terrible disease and all he gets is mild reproach, I make one little holocaust joke in a thread about cookery and I get bitched at.

You'll be glad to hear that I for one don't wish death on them.

But I do wish they'd all be punished by being forced to live in Goole with no means of transport.

Odd how stuff that's meant to be taken in jest (and let's be honest, we do say some horrible things on here - hello Maddie) randomly doesn't sometimes, eh?

Nobody's clambered onto the moral high ground to tell Comical off for his admission of saying the most insultingly hateful, racist things to Nigerians over eBay scams, I also notice.

While I will still buy things (rather infrequently, and only if I can't find it elsewhere) from eBay, this thread reminds me why I will never sell on there again. It's a mug's game.

Chinny: ask them to send a photo of themselves with a loaf of bread and a fish on their head.

He's an angry man and none of us wish to die. If you were angry/dangerous we might afford you the same respect.

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Their birth certificate is proof of guilt

While I'm not racist, I know it's one of the worst possible ways to insult someone, and when some cunt is trying to scam me out of hundreds of quids worth of laptop, I'll put the moral qualms about it aside and be as offensive as possible. In lieu of being able to beat them to death, it's the best I can muster. This might seem like an odd justification, but I never claimed to make sense.

I apologise for any offense this has caused you.

I will confess to being a bit puzzled - we say relentlessly horrible and offensive things against pretty much everyone on earth here, and I don't understand why this in particular has caught your attention, nor why it wasn't taken as it was meant (in the same aggravated yet OTT-for-the-sake-of-it context of Comical's earlier comment).

I can't help the fact that everyone who has tried to defraud me on eBay has been Nigerian, nor that I'm far from the only one.

Don't feel overly poked Metal, you can't please everyone with your words all of the time.

Unfortunately Nigerians have to accept the poor stereotype that 'they're all scammers' because like most stereotypes there are grains of truth to it.

Much in the same way the British are no doubt seen to be alcoholic hooligans given the way 'we' act when anywhere abroad where there's alcohol or football being played. If I was from another country, looking at 'the british', I'd certain wish us all to die of aids as well, because 'our' behavior is loutish and unacceptable, even if it doesn't apply to exhaustively everyone.

Trying to please everyone with her words was what lost Carol her job:

Fucking jews eh?

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I can't possibly believe for a second that you actually think he meant it.

We have probably found the much ballyhooed 'tipping point' in this thread.

Nice of you to take up the Bernard Manning 'I'm not racist because I say this about everyone' routine though

I'd written some stuff here but have decided it wouldn't really serve any purpose, so I'm just going to leave it here, okay?

LOL @ thread.

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And Jesus wept.

How did Nigeria become the international centre of dodgy internet scams? Are they actually all based there? Why don't we have thread saying "Bloody Cameroonians, always scamming?"

Nigeria was always the international centre of dodgy mail fraud scams so the fact that they're the world leaders for internet based stuff isn't surprising.

There's some good sites devoted to it actually, 'scam-baiting' - 419eater.com and so on, if you've got a decade or two to waste reading them.

The bewildering part though is that they ever manage to get money out of anyone..

I notice it does help to list your items in dutch instead of english what i did before (to attract more buyers. I know that isn't of much help to you and it will be only be some itime the a nigerian scammer will learn dutch (they are often based in the netherlands these days), it gives me a few more years/months of happy ebaying

Blast! Posting the laptop in Dutch with "Ik zal aan het slechts UK verzenden." appended would have been a surefire winner.

With a day to go it is still 80 quid short of the £175 reserve I set. Hmmmm. Wonder if it will make it.

Can someone explain to me the point of a reserve price on Ebay? If you don't want to sell below a certain price just set the minimum bid to that. I don't get it. I don't bother with reserve auctions on principle as I can't be arsed playing "second guess the seller".

People don't tend to bid on items that have a high minimum bid. Don't ask why.

Good news: The laptop sold for £209 (although I owe 17.5% of that to the VAT man).

Bad news: About 20 minutes before the auction ended I was testing the laptop for the final time and the power supply failed. So I've had to order a replacement and send a grovelling email to the guy who purchased it. So that's 30 quid less for me. Grrrrrr!!!!

Am I fucking cursed lately?

The guy who bought it wants to collect it in person and pay cash. Should I be wary?

I offer this as one of my delivery methods, saves me a job. Haven't the first clue how I'd parcel up a moses basket anyway!