The EBay thread.

[monster]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Social gaffe? Here? Not a chance.

this too. xoB is not the only one here with limited social skills..... if you made a social gaffe, no-one would notice. Unless you posted spamlinks. Here you're more likely to piss people off with a nerd-gaffe. It's like nerve gas for people with stuffy noses.

[BigV]

just curious, what is a social gaffe? Is there meat in it?

[BigV]

Snakeadelic, straight up. You're doing fine here. Seriously.

[Snakeadelic]

Well, there can be meat in a social gaffe...dropping food on a celebrity at a party would be considered a gaffe. I'm pretty sure that's the right spelling; if you take off the 'e' at the end I think it's a giant hook used to pull in particularly large fish on commercial boats. Laughing so hard you spit a bunch of half-chewed meat on someone would also be a social gaffe, so yeah, meat could be a factor.

And thank you all for both tolerance and reassurance.

[Snakeadelic]

Clod, the big problem with Blu-Ray is cost. I think between the two of us we get about $1500 a month, and my sweetie has a payee and must keep receipts and do monthly budget paperwork. It's worth it because the payee is legally responsible for making sure our rent and utilities are paid on time (the bill goes to them, not us), which is a huge relief since we both have occasional memory problems. We're already looking at replacing 2 computers, plus I need to buy a new external drive and pay the local shop to clone the old one onto it before I lose my several thousand pages of creative writing and a photo archive that's over 150,000 images. The external drive will be cheap; the shop help not so much. My tower, however, was not new 4 years ago when my dad up and gave it to me, and it only has an 80-gig hard drive. The fact that it won't even complete startup with my terabyte external connected leads me to suspect it doesn't have the power to copy that much data over even in small bursts. The terabyte drive is rapidly approaching 60% full, and I have over 2,000 images still on my big camera that I need to add to the burden.

Our TV is a "what can we afford" from K-Mart that we bought when our old wide-body developed a severe screen discoloration. That had been, we were warned, the LAST wide-body TV our area stores were stocking. The pawnshop does NOT have the ability to test big electronics--not enough space to arrange the store so the outlets would be accessible--and they do not offer any return or guarantee of functionality on anything. Plus, watching Forensic Files or some such and realizing they were profiling the brother of one of the married-couple owners for identity theft and credit fraud has made the notion of keeping a straight face in that place...unlikely.

Maybe once all the ancient computing equipment (my tower is the second-youngest device in the house behind my sweetie's gotta-replace-the-failing-tablet from last year) is dealt with we can look around for Blu-Ray compatible entertainment electronics, but we'll have to get a ride to the next county north to find a store big enough to carry those electronics. Our K-Mart is the only store in town with major electronics, and it is smaller than both of the grocery stores flanking it. Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy are all a 50-mile one-way, and neither of us trust our luck with electronics enough to order big ones online.

So maybe eventually we trade the Blu-Ray Potter set, or maybe eventually we buy the DVD version and regift the Blu-Ray, or maybe we eventually switch out the entertainment system for something a little less 2010-style. Only time will tell.

[Undertoad]

The pawnshop does NOT have the ability to test big electronics--not enough space to arrange the store so the outlets would be accessible

That's a big problem in pawn shops, since extension cords are simply unavailable in this day and age. They simply cannot be bought.

[Snakeadelic]

Originally Posted by monster

this too. xoB is not the only one here with limited social skills..... if you made a social gaffe, no-one would notice. Unless you posted spamlinks. Here you're more likely to piss people off with a nerd-gaffe. It's like nerve gas for people with stuffy noses.

I don't like spam, canned or electronic I try to only post links I've safely taken my browser to see, and I try to run them through TinyURL to avoid driving people even crazier.

As for a nerd-gaffe, if I KNOW that I KNOW my source material, I'll make a definitive statement. If I have uncertainty, I am more likely to ask questions than pretend to know. The less I lie, sneak, and fake it online, the less my brain has to work to remember who knows what. I'm pretty good with a couple of fandoms, pretty good with gems and geology, and REALLY good with zoology, taxonomy, and domestic animals.

And I used to know a guy who, a decade later, still reminisced about the good old days in his Navy boot camp when he could do the tear gas room as required (mask on, then mask off) and then sneak back in unmasked and hang out in the gas for about ten minutes. He said it was the only time his sinuses were ever clear for more than an hour. Probably shouldn't have settled in Seattle, poor guy--it took more than 5 years here at 4200 or so feet above sea level to get the Seattle mildew and mold out of my sweetie's sinuses. He hardly snores at all any more, and when I met him he snored so bad I was the only girl he'd dated in several YEARS who would even try to sleep over.

[Snakeadelic]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

That's a big problem in pawn shops, since extension cords are simply unavailable in this day and age. They simply cannot be bought.

The owners of the store do not allow people to bring in their own extension cords, citing "the risk of causing another patron to trip and get injured"--I actually heard them tell someone that with my own ears--and their 'store policy' of no tests, no guarantees. All I've ever bought there so far is DVDs, which they leave in the cases because they're right next to the cash register for easy supervision, and my black leather floor-length coat that I wear for armor when I'm out in the woods and such.

The problem's not the availability of extension cords, it's that the owners have a jackass 'tude and the town's so small they're the only pawn shop. We're big enough for 4 grocery stores, 2 liquor stores, a number of bars I haven't bothered to count, and the county's biggest hospital, but only 1 pawn shop.

There's another place that CLAIMS to be a pawn shop, but all they have is pawned jewelry and retail-priced guns, ammo, and shooting accessories. They don't accept or sell electronics. This difficulty in buying locally is 1 down side of non-urban living.

[Undertoad]

As a pawnbroker I can tell you , that shop has two things.

- extension cords to test things they actually want to test

- bullshit lines to quickly turn away people who want to bring in low-profit piece of shit electronic items that nobody actually wants

There are certain really high-value items that have great value if they just power on, and no value if they don't. Corded tools, for example. Are you going to not take a nice $1000 mitre saw because you didn't have a $1.99 extension cord? No, you're going to FIND a way to plug it in, turn it on, and get your profit.

The shop is under no obligation to tell anyone the truth. You should expect many polite lies out of a pawn shop.

Lastly if you have eBay you have the largest pawn shop ever under your fingertips no matter where you live.

[Snakeadelic]

Well, I have personal issues with eBay, but I know people with accounts and sometimes if the timing's right I can get them money before something sells, or pay them back later.

I'm 100% sure that at least half of what I've heard the owners say in that place was, in fact, BS intended to keep the store clear of layabouts and wishful thinkers. Also, ever since that thing with the wife's brother, I don't trust them at all and I am not sure I should be trusted not to say anything tacky about it. Here's the Cliff Notes version...

Shop owner's wife hears me & neighbor talking about how excited we were to get to see Queensryche. Wife says her brother (by name) is now part of the band, and since they suddenly had this like 30-year-old stranger on guitar instead of whoever replaced Chris DeGarmo, we think "meh, maybe plausible but she's probably got the band name wrong." Couple years later, I'm up late one night and have Forensic Files or some other true-crime summary series running. They start talking about a case involving identity theft, credit card fraud, and a man (same name pawnshop lady gave as her brother, first and last) involved with "a singer and band very famous in the 1980s metal scene". Then they show a pic of the now-incarcerated suspect and yup, younger-than-the-band guitarist it is. I now have paranoid suspicions about the two times since then that my bank has been forced to reissue all customer credit and debit cards--not because the bank was hacked, but because it's their policy to cancel and reissue all cards if a local business gets hacked.

So between "your brother was ON TV for being an identity thief and purveyor of credit card fraud" and "Jesus you guys lie to your customers a lot", I'm not entirely...confident...in my own verbal filters. Other than my coat, all I bought there on virtually every trip was DVDs, and now we're down to a few that are either impossible to find used and a few that we were sure we already had.

[Snakeadelic]

I have bought fun stuff off eBay in the past, and been outbid on a few really awesome things (I wanted that radio-controlled, walking & roaring on command Godzilla toy just to see the cats react). When circumstances allow I'll doubtless find something else there someday that I simply MUST have (like the $13 Invader Zim theme picture disc vinyl).

Maybe someday I'll get brave enough to contact PayPal about what it will take to re-activate my account functionality. The problem I and several of my acquaintances had with their 'infrequent shopper' information demands is that they cut us off completely from adding money to our PP accounts by the only means routinely available--shifting money from our PayPal-verified checking accounts to our PayPal accounts. We could do literally anything else, but we had nothing to sell to earn PayPal money and our friends and families tend to be as broke as we are. I tried logging in 2 years after they demanded the information I did not wish to give them in the form they said they required and although my login info all still worked, my account was still locked to adding money via my checking account, so I guess I might attempt a new account someday. Especially since someone hacked the 16-year-old (not kidding) Hotmail addy attached and I had to let my Hotmail account die because it wouldn't even let me back in.

[Snakeadelic]

For the record, the Harry Potter problem has been solved . Awesomely!

[glatt]

Should I give this guy negative feedback?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/GEERTOP-1-pe...MAAOSwio1ZmuhD

I bought one of his tents because I wanted a very small lightweight tent. It came without poles (which I expected and is a weight saving feature) and it also came without the pictured orange (or any color) rain fly. A tent is essentially worthless without a rain fly. Rain has a habit of falling through screening, like the roof of the inner tent I did get.

Please tell me if it's reasonable to give him negative feedback for being deceptive. I've never given negative feedback before.

I will have the option to return the inner tent at my expense, I'm sure, but I don't see why I should have to pay a penny when he was deceptive. I just want my rain fly.

[monster]

did you contact him about it? If not, do that first

[glatt]

Yes. Waiting for a response. I am just wondering what the next step is when he tells me to return it. I'd be willing to return it if he sends a prepaid shipping label at his expense.