eBay sniping

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, TeoZ wrote: I only had one bad experience buying something through a newsgroup. I advertised a want ad for an Apple ][. Some guy came forward and said he had one. He said it worked. Ok cool. We negotiated a price of $75. When I got it, the CPU and socket looked like it had been ripped from the motherboard. There was no way this thing "worked". So I brought it up with him and he insisted that he didn't know how it happened. And it obviously couldn't have happened in transit. I told the guy to give me my money back and to pay for the shipping of the unit back to him. He balked. So I went on the newsgroups and posted a few messages about the transaction. That changed his tune quick. He complained that I was ruining his reputation. I told him I wasn't saying anything that wasn't true (which was correct). I made the offer that if he sent me back $50 I would post a retraction. He did, and I did (I posted that we had settled the dispute satisfactorily). The moral of the story: people will always be stupid. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *