![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Objets d'Arse
Thursday, March 11th, 2004 05:56 pmAfter a two year break, I have rediscovered the joys and perils of e-bay.
The joy, of course, is finding a long wanted piece of dross and obtaining it when all other sources have failed. This is clearly a GOOD thing.
The perils though, are more pernicious: getting into a bidding war and paying more than you intended or, worse, making an impulse bid and then getting into a bidding war.
So far, I have managed to stay on the sane side of bidding. Despite an almost irresistible urge, and admittedly being saved on one occasion by a slow-loading server, I have placed my maximum bid and walked away. I think it was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kneeshooter who, a while back, pointed out that there is a sense of relief at being out bid when you suddenly aren't sure that you want an item.
He's right, of course.
That sense of relief is still there, though, when you do want the item but have decided that maybe you were just a touch overzealous in assigning an upper price limit. The problem is that the buggers always wait to outbid you until there is about three minutes to go on the auction, and you have been fretting over your spend-thrift proclivities for the biggest part of ten days. And in these cases the person you have been up against for the bulk of that ten days chickened out just 27p short of taking pole position.
So you wait and wait, and fret and fret and then, just at the very last minute, someone bids an extra quid and you are off the hook.
Of course, sometimes you just have to like and lump the fact that you have bid for and won a big glass artefact of no discernible function, and with no aesthetic savings.
This has never happened to me.
Edited to add:
Of course, I forgot to mention the suspense of waiting for stuff bought from abroad.
That's never happened to me.
The joy, of course, is finding a long wanted piece of dross and obtaining it when all other sources have failed. This is clearly a GOOD thing.
The perils though, are more pernicious: getting into a bidding war and paying more than you intended or, worse, making an impulse bid and then getting into a bidding war.
So far, I have managed to stay on the sane side of bidding. Despite an almost irresistible urge, and admittedly being saved on one occasion by a slow-loading server, I have placed my maximum bid and walked away. I think it was
kneeshooter who, a while back, pointed out that there is a sense of relief at being out bid when you suddenly aren't sure that you want an item. He's right, of course.
That sense of relief is still there, though, when you do want the item but have decided that maybe you were just a touch overzealous in assigning an upper price limit. The problem is that the buggers always wait to outbid you until there is about three minutes to go on the auction, and you have been fretting over your spend-thrift proclivities for the biggest part of ten days. And in these cases the person you have been up against for the bulk of that ten days chickened out just 27p short of taking pole position.
So you wait and wait, and fret and fret and then, just at the very last minute, someone bids an extra quid and you are off the hook.
Of course, sometimes you just have to like and lump the fact that you have bid for and won a big glass artefact of no discernible function, and with no aesthetic savings.
This has never happened to me.
Edited to add:
Of course, I forgot to mention the suspense of waiting for stuff bought from abroad.
That's never happened to me.
