I Have an eBay Problem

I never had a problem before. In fact, I never ever used eBay before. The only time I ever even WENT to the site, it was to do a search for the word “erotic” when PayPal started giving erotic romance web sites a problem about using their services (hypocrites—for those who don’t know, eBay now owns PayPal, and they had over 3000 items on the site under the word “erotic”).

Several wonderful people have donated books and manuscript critiques for bid to raise funds to help Marianne Mancusi, an author whose house was struck by lightning and burned down while she was away. These items are up for bid on eBay, so I went to check them out. Some of the things I would like to have had fairly low bids so far, so I went ahead and set up an account and started bidding on them. I don’t really care if I get the critiques or not, but I wanted to drive up the bidding a bit. It’s for a good cause.

So I bid. And I’m told that I’m outbid. ALREADY. Before my bid even goes IN. And this is where it gets bad. I increased my maximum bid. TWICE. On the same item.

Luckily, the very satisfying message that I am the high bidder came up before I remortgaged my house or something, but man, that gets real addictive, real fast.

Now, I just have to ignore those pesky notices in my e-mail box.