On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, TeoZ wrote:
> These days I pay mostly by paypal. I have never got burned on a transaction
> so far from EBAY, newsgroups, or from people I talk to on swaplists or
> websites. I must be lucky.
I only had one bad experience buying something through a newsgroup. I
advertised a want ad for an Apple ][. Some guy came forward and said he
had one. He said it worked. Ok cool. We negotiated a price of $75.
When I got it, the CPU and socket looked like it had been ripped from the
motherboard. There was no way this thing "worked". So I brought it up
with him and he insisted that he didn't know how it happened. And it
obviously couldn't have happened in transit.
I told the guy to give me my money back and to pay for the shipping of the
unit back to him. He balked. So I went on the newsgroups and posted a
few messages about the transaction. That changed his tune quick. He
complained that I was ruining his reputation. I told him I wasn't saying
anything that wasn't true (which was correct). I made the offer that if
he sent me back $50 I would post a retraction. He did, and I did (I
posted that we had settled the dispute satisfactorily).
The moral of the story: people will always be stupid.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
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Received on Fri Apr 25 2003 - 02:21:00 BST