“retrograde like a motherfucker” – part i & ii

baby, no bullshit…

…so i thought kramer might have something when he described mercury with the title of this bit and how it pertained to me. all due to a sloppy shitty end to what, let’s face it, was a fairly sloppy and shitty relationship. so it goes when one of the people in it is married and while claiming to be unhappy although apparently not so unhappy that she actually wants to DO something about it. that was about ten days ago.

moving on…in more than one sense of the phrase, i suppose…

so then came the ebay drama of last week – i went to sell some jewelry and a netbook. the jewelry went off without a hitch (in fact i need to mail it off when i bike across town in a bit, but we’ll explain that more in detail in part iii) but the netbook, which was the main reason for this batch of sales, was a different story.

i got it for $130…sorta. the reason i add the “sorta” is because i got it at the pawn shop where the whole $1,000.00 debaucle happened. to cover the $35 fee from my mortgage company for the returned payment they zeroed out a layawy i owed $30 on (a bike) AND one i owed $40 on (the netbook). so the receipt for the netbook says “$130” but in reality i got it for more like $100. i put it up with a start of $125 and a day later had nothing. lots of views and watches, but no bids. i got impatient and dropped the opening bid to $25 but put a $125 reserve.

that got it going.

so from there it stalled at $91.00 a day or two before the auction closed. that’s when i realized i’d paid less than a $100 for it anyway and dropped the reserve to $99.00 which is told to anybody watching or bidding on the item (“the seller has lowered the reserve on this item” the message would say) and it met its new reserve within hours. than kept going on up to $116.00 where it closed to a girl that clearly doesn’t speak english well in puerto rico.

anything i auction has three rules – paypal only, pay within forty-eight hours of the auction closing (i make allowances on stuff that closes on the weekend on that rule) and no international bidders. TECHNICALLY i guess puerto rico is kinda u.s. soil…but the way this girl acted didn’t seem it.

so she paid for the item but didn’t pay shipping. i couldn’t figure this out, but she INSISTED my item had free shipping. i argued with her about this, ’cause when i looked at the item it showed fifteen bucks, but she got out for free…so i figured it HAD to show free shipping, ’cause how else could she have paid. when i finally relented (keep in mind this was all via email and this whole back and forth still took under an hour” she said, “no – now you’ve upset me. i don’t want the netbook any more. just give me back my money”. i explained that the money was in transition from paypal to my bank and would take a few days, more than likely monday (this was thursday) and i’d have it back to her…but i would put a second chance offer out for the guy she outbid and if he paid quick i would just refund her out of those funds and she’d get it quicker.

this is where it got interesting.

ebay lesson for you folks – if you sell something on that site, and the customer doesn’t pay you, ebay makes you wait four (4) days from the end of the auction till you can file a non-payment claim. four days. not three days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-nine minutes – FOUR days. down to the minute from when the auction closed. but if a customer pays they can claim they didn’t recieve their item and you’re ripping them off apparently within moments of paying you – ’cause it happened to me.

so when she filed about not recieving her item it cancelled the bank transfer (which almost resulted in my phone getting cut off as that was where those funds were supposed to be going, but i got an extension) and i had to refund her. turns out that the guy she outbid was still way interested and i had payment from him by friday (which was in my account today (monday)). turns out she selected the “local pick up option”, which is free, to avoid the shipping charge – but that’s for LOCALS. i put that on because the first thing i ever sold on ebay was a notebook case that wasn’t getting bids so i put it on here with a link and within an hour a whore reader used the buy it now and paid…

…and it was a whore reader in the building NEXT TO ME at dell when i worked there. so i walked the case over to him (he’d asked for me to deliver to his office ’cause he didn’t trust his new apartment complex) and gave him the case AND the ten bucks i’d charged for shipping which he handed back to me and said “hey, you hand delivered within six hours – that’s worth ten bucks to me!” and then proceeded to geek out on the fact the guy who wrote the whore worked for dell, stating that “he didn’t know any really cool people worked here”. yeah, we saw how that wound up, didn’t we?

i discovered what she’d done thanks to a call to paypal customer service (a US rep, i should add, in utah) who said that was bullshit and locked up her paypal account pending “investigation into extortion and fraudulent practices” and then passed me to ebay (ANOTHER US REP!!!) and they suspended her ebay account for six months.

i thought i’d won for real here. had my money, all be it a day or two later, and she paid dearly for it. all good karmically. i was gonna beat this mercury retrograde after all…

…or so i thought.