ebay relief

I've become something of a fan of ebay. I've managed to sell a few items and last week I bought a lovely little Philips MP3 player at a considerable discount as number one daughter's christmas present (how come I'm buying and giving christmas presents in November is worth a blog entry all of itself). Number one wife has been somewhat sceptical of my cavalier bidding style and I have of course been dismissing these fears with an airy wave of my mouse hand.

Until last Thursday. I wanted to buy a thing which was very hard to get hold of. Paul (so it is his fault) suggested that I tried ebay. And I found one, bought it with Buy Now, and then discovered that the seller actually hadn't got it for sale. And I was a few hundred pounds down.

Now this posed a problem. How do you find out whether or not someone is a rip off merchant without asking outright? The good news was that the seller seemed a regular guy and that it was just the case that he had been misled at his end too. The bad news was that I figured that a really successful operator would be good at sounding regular - in the same way that only the lesser burglars actually wear striped jerseys and carry sacks marked "swag". So it has been a somewhat nervous few days.

Anyhoo, today I got my money back. I have never been quite so pleased to be returned to the status quo.