Ebay ripoff: join the club!
For the last couple of days I woke up in a stinky mood. It isn’t just the subdued, grey autum light which makes me unfailingly grumpy; it’s when I remember the laptop.
Don’t—ever—buy a second-hand laptop on Ebay.
I don’t know what possessed me to be so stupid. Or wait, I do: it is those people (including some people I admire and who should really know better, but perhaps get it on expenses) who replace their laptops every twelve months because the processor speed and RAM can’t keep up with the endless software upgrades and antivirus measures and security patches and general expanding bloatiness that is Windoze. These machines are perfectly suited to run various flavours of LINUX with great speed and efficiency for many years to come (this desktop may yet serve out a decade and it works perfectly well with RedHat 7.2, even though I wished I had a more up-to-date kernel). All these unloved, discarded machines have to go somewhere. And that place, I reasoned, is Ebay.
I honestly believed I could pick up a Toshiba Portège A600 like the one our mate bought last year for about 50 quid, but they still retail at about £600. A bit disillusioned, I reviewed my budget upwards; twice. Eventually I bid £175 for an IBM thinkpad and realised with a sinking heart that that would not include VAT—what had I done? But they’d upgrade it to 526MB RAM for another 20 quid. That sounded allright. It was—the thing sold to somebody else for £260.
Now I was in the Zone; I kept browsing.
At that time John had joined in the fun. I emailed him the description for the Dell Latitude C600 and he told me I could bid up to £175 for it. “It’s a nice little machine.”
“If you say so…” I shrugged. My maximum bid would not be known to the seller so I might still get it for less. The latest offer had stood at £102 for two hours and would stay for two more. I thought I had the machine in my pocket for a relatively reasonable price and went off to make dinner, leaving Ebay to its own devices.
I returned 10 minutes before close of auction to find my bid at £115. “Damn,” I cussed and before I could draw breath back in through clenched teeth it had jumped to £125. I looked at the auction time Oh, come on, six goddamn minutes… I looked again.
“Jooohn,” I wailed: “I’m losing it!”
“Who, what?”
3 minutes, £145, two minutes, £ 165, 1 minute…
“Shall I increase the bid?” I shrilled, finger curled over the bidding button.
And then the green tick appeared. I had won the thing at £175. Phew. Or maybe not: was I crazy to spend that much on a clapped-out, old laptop? And I was going to increase the bid?
Ebay is like a drug: the adrenaline rush in the final minutes of an auction makes you feel so alive! And had Ebay not always been good to me? So far I’d spent nearly 60 quid on various bits and pieces and the service had always been prompt and reliable. So the seller wasn’t a powerseller, but he did have a little star next to his name. I checked out his feedback. He was more of a buyer, an occasional buyer at that. Not one who had much to lose.
I didn’t hear from him for several days. I understood, he is a busy man; a small-scale, private seller with a dayjob. At least I didn’t have to pay VAT. Eventually, I emailed him a friendly reminder.
He emailed me back at leisure. Some confusion had arisen over my address after he entered the wrong postcode into a search engine. He might have used the address supplied by PayPal, but shit happens.
Time went by. I was about to chase him up again when the doorbell rang and the package arrived. Nestled between an (empty) 6-pint milk tub,a sawn-off fruit carton, two bath sponges and a crunched up plastic bag was the laptop. Now I knew what the packing fee was for.
I charged it up and later that evening, we pressed ‘start’. Microshit’s horrendous sound was still on it even though it was advertised without an OS; at least the guy wasn’t a LINUX user who are less likely to sell their machines if a little more life can be squeezed out of them.The windoze desktop appeared sans icons but with a column of grey, flickering stripes dancing down the left hand side of the screen. My face fell. But it was probably the result of a messy uninstall. John whipped out his Knoppix CD and voilà: a smooth screen. Big sigh of relief, positive feedback, deal closed.
Two days ago, John found a window in his busy schedule to prepare the laptop for installing Debian. This time, the flicker stayed when he booted it with Knoppix. It got worse: the keyboard no longer responded properly. Either something had shaken loose during the haphazard shipping (the box wasn’t marked ‘fragile’ or anything and it would rattle if you shook it, which the mail guys probably did. —The >20 quid fee did not go on paying for careful delivery), or the laptop had started to fail after rough handling by the seller himself so he figured he’d flog it on Ebay and let it become somebody else’s problem (hint: take a snap of your laptop before it breaks down, so that yit looks good on the listing; admit to minor blemishes (a line of dead pixels here, a scratch there) so that you appear sincere).
Now I’m left with a pile of crap and a fuming temper. I might open a dispute for all the good that will do: I can’t prove that it wasn’t me who damaged the machine. It will only gnaw away at my ulcers. Or I might just shove the damn thing into a corner and forget about it and plan for my forthcoming trip. Because I know that the instant I step on that plane, none of this will matter anymore.
Tags: computers and gadgets, Tag Index
Denni
October 7th, 2005 at 07:13
Sounds exactly like what happened to me! File a dispute for sure. You have 90 days to do so I believe. Get a refund – go for it!! Hopefully your seller isn’t a know it all agressive moron like mine was.
October 14th, 2005 at 20:27
Thanks Lisa, good to know I’m not alone. Dispute filed, but I may not have a way to prove that I did not break the thing myself…