Someone Somewhere Needs All These Things
I had a devil of a time coming up with a title for this post; everything contained within is something I would never have bought for myself. Logically, I figure the opposite of me is out there somewhere and needs all these things, and so this post is for them. Only the post though, I’m keeping the stuff. Package glamour shot!
Not much reason to dwell to long here, although I always love the packages from China, they’ve got so much going on. Let’s see what’s in the regular envelopes first.
What you see here is “RAGGEDY ANN scrapbook embellishment ANNIE primitive tags DIETS prim WEIGHT LOSS” [#400299043478]. This is actually the second set of these that got sent to me, apparently the USPS ate the first set, which is ironic, dontcha think? Don’t answer that. I’m not really sure what you do with these; I understand scrapbooking, I think, but these seem fairly… rude? Offensive? Mean spirited? I don’t even know. I guess you could put them on a box of fancy chocolates that you give to your wife, and then you get to eat the chocolates, and sleep on the couch watching Three Stooges all night. Pretty win/win scenario. Don’t blame me for that, blame the tags, they’re giving off some kind of “-ism” radiation; I think I need to lie down. Price: $1.04.
Alright, let’s try not to offend any more people. What we have here is a lovely “Plastic Holy Prayer Card Holy Family Feast Day Christ” [#400304288696]. It has a prayer on the back, which I don’t feel is important enough to need a second picture, but trust me, it’s very inspiring. I’m pretty sure they give these things out for free in churches… I wonder if someone could just go to their local church, grab a bunch of these, and pop them on eBay, but I don’t need the extra sin – I do pretty well just doing what I do normally. Price: $0.99..
Here’s a very nice “NEW Motorola Carabiner Green / Red Velcro Strap” [#140783112505]. Usually when you get these, it has a warning about how it’s “not rated for mountain climbing”, which is silly, because they’re usually super cheap looking and in no way resemble the sort of gear you would use to climb a mountain. However, this one didn’t have that warning, so I guess you can use it to climb mountains! That said, it does have other warnings which are actually really scary. “Caution to Pacemaker Users”? “maintain a minimum of six inches (15 centimeters) between your phone and a pacemaker”. Even without a pacemaker, it wars you to “ensure that the phone and its antenna are at least one inch (2.5 centimeters) away from your body while transmitting.” Is this a velcro strap, or an alien device bent on humanity’s destruction via cellphones? Possibly both. Occam’s Razor and all that. Price: $0.99.
Well, this last image surely needs no explanation. You can see right on the package: “Women Accessory”. We all know every woman needs one of these; at least if they’re a Mac user. As you probably worked out, what we have here is a “Rubber Suction Ball Stand Holder for iPod Touch iPhone 4 4G” [#150836583575]. Total value, $7, so again the bot has basically made me money. Price: $0.62. Let’s have a look at it in use!
I’m pretty sure that kid can see into my soul. Brr.
So that wraps up another batch! As I said, the tags were lost in transit originally, according to the seller. I won those a month ago. In a purely automated system, they’d have been lost forever; a very sad prospect. I’m currently in contact with two other sellers over lost items. It is pretty hard to know if I should take a refund when offered, or ask for them to re-ship. With the prices the bot wins things at, either option makes me seem like a jerk.
The bot itself had the first hiccup in a long time today: An auction it was bidding on got sniped out from under it, causing it to underbid when it tried to snipe at the last second. This lead to a new message in the log, one that I was unprepared to parse, and so the bot sat around waiting for me to let it know what the hell was going on. I have it do this now in extreme cases, rather than just blindly tweet “something crazy happened” and bid on another auction. In the long run this saves me from winning 100 auctions in a single day before I notice it’s gone crazy, and while on one hand that’s good, on the other hand I really kind of wish I could give the bot $100 to spend in one day. Swimming around in packages like Scrooge McDuck…