[Milsurplus] Ebay shenanigans

[Hubert Miller]

It seems on about half the items I Ebay sell, I get a private Ebay message asking some variant of 
"What is your right-now price?"  I never grace these with a reply. My feeling is, let the market set
the price. Sometimes this does cut the wrong way, though. I had a bag of around 35  SO-239 
PL-259 connectors, new wrapped. I got the "right now?" message question and ignored it. My 
mistake was I set the minimum bid at $1, and you know what, there was one bidder. My mistake;
this one was a charity job. At least I got +feedback. I learned. 
The post recently that about 5% ( I think it was ) of Ebay customers are from the outset trouble,
is very interesting. I recall some years back, five? ten? I was discussing tubes or maybe just Ebay
with some European fellow radio hobbyist. He mentioned something he was involved in and I 
don't recall all the particulars. I think it went like this: he had bought one of those "designer tubes"
intended for the audio fans, fanatics. I saw a designer tube once at a hamfest and the tube had its
own form fitting foam packaging in the box, like some camera or other such product. Anyway some
fellow he was acquainted with or otherwise had met had offered him this plan. The other fellow
had the same tube, but burned out or damaged or depleted. He suggested to the Euro fellow that
they use the Euro fellow's tube packaging and guarantee and get a whole new tube. I don't know 
what the split was to be. I also would think such a high priced, special deal tube would have its own
serial number, but as I said, I have forgotten some details. The Euro fellow emailed me an email from
this other fellow with incriminating info but the Euro fellow had cropped the image so the tube crook's
name had only the top edges of the letters. Nevertheless there was enough for me to sleuth it out and
determine the guy's name from what info the Euro fellow gave me about his occupation. Turns out the
would-be tube crook was a high-paid Federal employee, a lawyer in Wash. D.C.  You would think somebody
with a high GS rating could afford maybe the three hundred bucks for this tube. I read somewhere that 
5 - 10 % of our fellow humans are psycho or without what we call 'conscience'. Maybe so. They are out
there. 
-Hue Miller