Mom Column: #44

Wednesday, March 26, 2008


"Angry eBaying"

Anyone who has ever met me can attest to the fact that I am really a low key person. I am not the type to get in someone’s face and complain at a restaurant, I don’t stand up at a meeting and voice my opinion even if I do have one. If someone cuts me off in traffic I may say a curse word or two and drop it, forgetting it ever happened after a few minutes. That’s why it is so out of character for me to do what I did today.

A bit of background first. I love Ebay. I love to shop on Ebay, I love to list things on Ebay for myself and others, and I love the excitement of a close auction. When I win something on Ebay I pay for it immediately. If I sell something, I send an invoice right away, I don’t inflate the shipping costs and I mail the item as soon as it is paid for. That is why I get really irate at a poor ebayer, either one who won’t pay or one who gyps me out of my hard earned money. The latter is what happened that leads me to this story.

The day after Christmas I paid for an auction which was a one year subscription to People magazine. It cost me $52.95 which may sound like a lot, but if you buy it normally it is about $152. I have purchased several magazine subscriptions in the past with no trouble, so I didn’t expect this to be any different. The seller warned that it could take up to 12 weeks for the magazine to begin to arrive at my door. Please be patient…which I was until about 10 weeks had gone by and no People magazine had ever shown up. I emailed this guy and asked if I should be concerned, he wrote back after a week, stating that I had to give it the full 12 weeks, so I shut up and waited. And waited. And waited.

As you can probably guess, the magazine never did come. OK…the first step is to once again email the seller, but this time I got no response. I was nice enough, just mentioning that the 12 weeks had gone by, could I get a refund, on and on. No reply. I emailed again…again, no reply. My next step is to file a dispute with Paypal (the service I used to pay this guy, they are supposed to be the safest route to paying, insuring against rip-offs, etc…) I found out that the auction had been over 90 days ago, so I was out of luck, no dispute could be filed. I then went to Ebay and did the same, getting a similar response. There’s nothing they can do.

Now I’m starting to get a bit upset. I do a lot of business on ebay, I pay my fees, operate an honest business there and have spent mega bucks with them and this is how I get treated? I sent an email to them, voicing my disgust with their policy. In an effort to assuage an angry woman, they wrote back saying the best they could do was to give me this seller’s personal information such as address and phone number and perhaps we could work it out over the phone. I accepted this offer and planned my assault all morning. When I got home from work today I was all hepped up…I went right to work. First of all, I dialed his home phone and left a sort of nasty message on the answering machine. (I’m pretty brave when I’m all the way in SD and he’s in IL!). I then proceeded to use his email to further assault him with angry emails, one after another. As soon as I finished one email I would write another. His inbox should be full of insults and harassing language from me! My last line of attack was to leave very negative feedback. I went to his feedback profile and saw that there were many others who had been duped by this jerk. I left a negative, nasty feedback, and then sat back, somewhat satisfied and chuckled to myself.

“This is only the beginning” I thought to myself. “I will bombard this poor fool on a daily basis with phone calls and emails until he feels forced to refund my money!!” Perhaps I’ll even call during the middle of the night and demand retribution. Finally, I turned my attention to my normal internet doings and went to my email. There, in the inbox, was a message from this person. I hesitatingly clicked on the message and was chagrined to read that he is sorry for the subscription not being delivered and he will be happy to refund my payment. Oh crap….there’s no way I can take back the emails I had just sent! And the message on his machine!! I feel about an inch tall. I can’t believe that I have been griping about this person for weeks while doing nothing about it. Then the one day that I have my dander up, and kick “OPERATION MAKE EBAYER’S LIFE MISERABLE” into action is the same day he writes a polite offer to refund my money. This guy must think I’m a total nut case! He’ll probably report ME to ebay now, and prosecute me for telephone harassment. And all because I decided to stand up for something. Now I know why I keep my mouth shut most of the time…there’s a good lesson to learn here. That old saying “Look before you leap” should be changed to “check your new emails before hitting “send” on the insulting one you just wrote!”

 


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