My eBay Experience

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Recently we have been trying to de-clutter our house as much as possible. Most things we’re saving in a pile to take to the enormous annual family rummage sale. However, there were a few things that seemed a little more valuable than what we were likely to get at the rummage sale.

The first of these things was our Keurig B-30 single cup coffee maker. We liked it (you can read all about it here), but we actually liked it a little too much. The problem is that we turned into degenerate coffee addicts, and we needed something that could make more coffee at a time. We progressed past needing a single cup at a time.

This particular coffee maker retails for $100, and we were also including another adapter that retails for an additional $13.50, so this was a decently expensive setup and we thought we could get some money out of it. We looked around on eBay and saw that most of the similar things were going for about $50, with at least $10 for shipping, so we were assuming we could get at least that, especially if we were including the extra adapter. However, we decided if we got at least $30 for it, we would be happy, so we set the bid at $20 and did the listing.

Sara's Beautiful Photography

Now the first thing I noticed was that everybody and their mother immediately contacted me saying, “Oh hey, you’re getting rid of that? I’ll take it!” Well, if I wanted to give away this expensive device for free, I would have just said, “Who wants this?” instead of paying to list it in eBay! Or at least tried to sell it for $0.50 at the rummage sale. I wanted money folks, I wasn’t in it for the charity!

So we put our listing up on eBay and watched it closely for a few days. Absolutely nothing. A few views and that was it, no bids.

I think part of it was just that nobody likes to bid on an auction that has a lot of time left to go on it. So conceivably the bids would pick up as time went on. The other problem is that we created a totally new account for this, with no eBay history. I think people are distrustful of this, because they think I’m a scammer or something. Now everybody had to start with no history at some point, but I have a feeling that auctions by people with little or no history probably go for less money, due to this suspicion.

So we weren’t getting much action, but I felt like we would eventually. However, our first bid finally came in…from our friend Dabu!

She was the lone bidder at $20 for a few days, until we just decided to sell it to her if she wanted it. She was, after all, the only person who actually put their money where their mouth was.

Me: “If you still want it, we’ll give it to you for $30.”
Dabu: “I’ll give you $40!”

In other words, Dabu is about the worst haggler in the history of the world.

We found a way to take down the listing, so we’re only out the minimal cost of listing it in the first place. So we didn’t exactly have the full eBay experience (we don’t have to ship it or deal with the feedback system, two of the main components), but overall I would say it was fairly positive. It was easy to set up, and seemed to be working okay. I don’t know for sure if we would have gotten any bids if Dabu hadn’t bid on it, but I think we probably would have. However, I think it might not have gone for as much as some of the other ones did.

So overall, generally positive, and we might try selling some more stuff in the future!

Quote Monday is Aquatic

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie: “Why does Grandma Kathy go shopping? Why doesn’t she just order it?” – This was before we blew her mind with the information that there weren’t computers when Grandma Kathy was her age.

Me: “How did your pants get wet?”
Evie: “…water maybe?”

Evie: “Sometimes your leg gets bubbles in it. Then you can’t move it. It goes away eventually, but sometimes you forget and try to move it, and then you have to wait.” – I eventually figured out this meant her leg fell asleep because she was sitting on it. I thought “my leg gets bubbles” was a awfully poetic description though!

Evie: “Mama, what color is a whale’s bellybutton?”

Evie: “Do people live on Saturn?”
Sara: “No. Earth is the only planet people live on.”
Evie: “What about France?

Why waste your time planning for all these OTHER ridiculous disasters…

/ Shane / Leave a comment

…when there are real, actual threats you should be planning for!

Link via GraphJam.

5 ways I “won” today

/ Shane / 4 Comments
  1. I maximized my leftover removal potential by combining the leftover chili with the leftover taco meat into one giant bowl of awesome.
  2. I sold something I didn’t need anymore instead of throwing it in the trash. I make money and I don’t generate trash — double win!
  3. I laid the foundation for a ridiculously epic event next month, which shall be known as “Halbach Baconfest”.
  4. I mastered the copy machine at work. I took 15 single sided, color pages and turned them into 10 copies of double-sided, color pages, which were already stapled for me.
  5. I live in a world where copy machines can staple pages. Hello, welcome to the future! Why waste 10 seconds doing a job myself, when I can pay thousands of dollars for an overly elaborate machine to do it! If that’s not a win, I don’t know what is.

Things that Annoy me, Part III

/ Shane / 2 Comments
Alright, now we’re up to 15 things that annoy me!
  1. If you are dropping kids off at school and you only pull over half way, you might as well not have pulled over. You’re still blocking everybody on the street. We both know it’s a fake effort, so just save the pretense and stop in the middle of the street.
  2. If I’m stopped at a stop sign and a pedestrian is crossing the street on the opposite side, then of course the cross traffic is free to go even though it is not their turn. However, if the cross traffic is trying to turn in the same direction I’m going, then they have to wait for the same person crossing as I do. In that case they are NOT allowed to go out of turn and then just sit in the intersection until the person is finished crossing!
  3. The fact that organic bananas now come wrapped in a plastic bag. The fact that any bananas would be wrapped in something that has to go in the trash is ridiculous. They kind of already come in a pretty handy wrapper. But to wrap specifically the organic bananas in trash is such a slap in the face. Oh, you actually care about your health and the Earth in general? Okay, well here’s some extra trash for the landfill for no reason!
  4. Concepts which are not internally consistent. This is especially true of movies, politicians, and people in their personal lives. If you give me a framework, I am willing to go with it…but don’t then violate the framework. If you tell me a “giant ray” can make a lizard 20 times its size, I’ll buy it. But then it can’t suddenly fly or ignore missiles smashing into its face. Government should stay out of our business and personal lives, or it shouldn’t. We should be religious or we should be debaucherous. None of it matters one way or the other to me, but pick a story and stick to it! You can’t have it both ways. Of course, if you can come up with some cockamimi story about why everything remains internally consistent, then I’m back on board again. Why didn’t you SAY that the giant-ray messes with the neurons in the lizard’s head giving him telekinetic powers??
  5. People who don’t like firm plans. In most cases, these people are known as “people who don’t have kids.” The only way I can get through a day is with a schedule. I have to know when I have to be somewhere, so that I can start getting the kids ready roughly 3 hours before that. When you have kids, you have certain milestones you have to hit (meal times, nap times, bed times, etc.) and those are firm deadlines. And when I hear, “Eh, we’ll just be there whenever”, then I know that means it’s not happening.