bullybones

We now interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming to bring you a cautionary tale about your twin buddies eBay and Pay“Pal”, and how they turn on you when the going gets rough. Very much like the American government, they behave in an extremely refined and civilized manner, but God help you if you haven’t read the fine print. My manner is not quite so refined, and this post may contain some strong language that might be offensive to our younger or more effete readers. Be forewarned.

Our story begins when I was foolish enough to purchase a 4-gigabyte no-name mp3 player on eBay from a merchant in Hong Kong. The merchant had dozens of identical mp3 players listed on eBay, and his seller feedback was 100% positive at the time I made my purchase, with 98 sales to his credit at that time. His ad oozed with unctuous concern for my customer satisfaction. And best of all, the ad proclaimed that I was protected by PayPal Buyer Protection, free coverage up to 500 British pounds! When I won the item for a price of 26 British pounds (a little over $52.00), I was pretty happy. Even when the item took almost a month to arrive, my enthusiasm was relatively undiminished.

Then I opened the package. All of the parts were there. But the manual, while technically in English, was utterly incomprehensible. Here’s an example from one of the introductory bullet points:

• Break to order to sow continuously: Broadcast the stop hour remembers to broadcast the position, the some song orders to a time while broadcast the some catalogue up is shut down, switch on after then park the last time of time order, Play after order to start broadcast from now on.

As you can see, I was left very much on my own.

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