On 12-Feb-05 at 09:02 Pete Bartusek wrote:
>My favorite ebay packing job was a 5.25" disk drive I received, packaged
>in twigs. Yes, a box, a pile of twigs surrounding a plastic apple 5.25"
>drive...
<snippety>
I can top this, Pete. Last year, I won the bid for a Dolch luggable, a PAC 62 to be exact. The thing was in excellent shape, and had originally come from (then) Network General as a 'Sniffer.' It even had the special 'Sniffer-certified' network cards and software still in it.
Anyway... It took five E-mails, two phone calls (all from me), a little over a month's time after the auction ended, and the case going into Ebay's arbitration system before he finally shipped. I determined later it was some teenager who normally sold car parts, and that the computer had come from a friend who he was giving access to his Ebay account to (a violation of Ebay rules in and of itself).
The unit finally arrived in a loose-fitting cardboard box with NO packing material around it whatsoever. None. Not so much as a piece of newspaper.
Amazingly enough, the only damage was that the cards had been jolted out of their slots, the internal frame was a tiny bit warped, and one support foot had been broken. All three issues were easily repaired, and, much to my astonishment, the unit fired right up and has been perfectly functional ever since, not so much as a bad sector on the hard drive. I put this minor miracle down to the durability of Dolch portables.
Oh, one other bit... When I left the twerp his (justifiably negative) feedback about the packing job, he had the unmitigated gall to respond that I'd been "impatient," and that he'd used the "same packing methods on everything else" he ships.
I guess car parts are, for the most part, immune to UPS's gorilla-handling techniques.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy,
Blue Feather Technologies --
http://www.bluefeathertech.com
kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m
"If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with surreal ports?"
Received on Sat Feb 12 2005 - 10:48:39 GMT