I won the monkey!
Actually, it’s a woven rattan chimp holding a banana–a real beauty–and it marked the beginning of my swift, slippery slide into eBay madness.
Until a few months ago, I didn’t know an eBay from an Amazon. Oh, I’d read news stories and heard the hype about this enormous electronic garage sale, but I had remained blissfully immune to the lure of on-line shopping. It seemed too involved for someone who got panicky just trying to set up an AOL instant-message buddy list.
Then Janet Reno went and took Elian Gonzalez from the fisherman.
As I sat watching the scene unfold on CNN that Saturday morning in April, my phone rang. It was an editor who wanted me to log on to eBay. Apparently, some sorry souls out there were having a field day hawking Elian souvenirs and it might make a sardonic sidebar to the hard news. So to eBay I went.
The story never happened, but my curiosity was tweaked. Hmm, I thought, I wonder if eBay might have that Heywood-Wakefield coffee table I’ve been lusting after for years. I entered the information and timidly hit “search,” then nearly fell off my chair when eBay had not one, but two of the treasured coffee tables. A Brooklyn antique dealer once told me, as I reluctantly declined to buy his Heywood-Wakefield for $600, that another table would be nearly impossible to find. Picking the better of the two tables offered, I decided to bid. The current price was $25. I boldly hit the “Bid!” paddle, typed in $100 and started planning where to put the table.
Three hours later, I was still logged on to eBay. Having recently converted our screened-in back porch to a tiki lounge, I had decided some funky accessories were in order. I typed in “rattan” and there, amid more than 100 “rattan” offerings, was the tiki that would prove my undoing: “Old Wicker Rattan Bamboo Hanging Monkey.”
Circa 1940, he was 14 inches high and cute as all get-out, hanging there from an arm stretched over his head, the other holding the banana. I had to have him. The bidding had started at $2.91. I upped it to $3 and change and silently congratulated myself on my savvy shopping skills.
The next day marked the end of the coffee-table auction. With just 10 minutes to go, I was still top bidder. But then, with about a minute and a half left, the price suddenly jumped to $150, and then, inexplicably, to $250. Before I even knew what hit me, the auction had ended.
I was livid. How dare they, these sneaky, anonymous e-pirates, swoop in and steal my table? In eBayland, I soon learned, the term for this last-minute, just-under-the-wire bidding is “sniping.” These stealthy buyers lull the uninitiated and unsuspecting into a false sense of security and then bam! they climb up on the roof and open fire.
Ebay, which boasts 4 million new auctions and 500,000 new items every day, gives bidders all kinds of helpful tips. Among the sound advice: When you see something you want, decide the absolute maximum you are willing to spend, make your bid and then forget about it. If you win, you win, if not, well, tomorrow’s another day.
Ha! Nice theory, but it goes straight out the window in the heat of the moment. I’d learned my lesson, and my fierce competitive streak had reared its head.
When the final hour of the monkey auction rolled around, I was ready, and still the high bidder. But sure enough, with a couple of minutes to go, I was outbid. As I swiftly moved to up the ante, a curious thing happened: My hands began to shake, my adrenalin pumped so hard it made my ears roar, and my palms started sweating like a sinner in front of St. Peter.
I was one big ball of anxiety–but it was strangely exhilarating, maybe even intoxicating. I had to have that monkey! And, as the clock ran out, I emerged victorious. I’d beaten nine other bidders and, for $16.91, the monkey was mine. I let out a long whoop, and immediately e-mailed my friends to brag of my prowess.
An obsession was born.
Though the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (jointly run by the FBI and the Justice Department) says almost half the 10,000 consumer complaints it has had since May are about fraud at on-line auction houses, I was willing to take the chance. I couldn’t get enough of eBay. I was on-line for hours at a time, at all hours of the day and night. EBay auctions work on Pacific time, and I’d set the alarm to catch the auctions that expired in the early morning. I set my cell-phone clock to Pacific time so I didn’t have to figure the time difference when I traveled. I’d log on from airports to check out the action, and to see if eBay had sent me one of those nice little e-minders, telling me I’d been outbid but still had time to check my bank account and re-up.
The more time I spent on eBay, the more I found to buy: a set of pink elephant cocktail stirrers. A vintage GOP hand-embroidered apron I bestowed on a Democrat pal. An out-of-print book on breaking the Enigma war code. Four old postcards from Troy, Ala. Two Heywood-Wakefield chairs.
My desire to win, already heightened, kicked into overdrive. I lived for those last few auction minutes and that inevitable, sweaty rush that came with victory. Even when I lost, I found myself high from the thrill of the chase.
When I wasn’t on-line, I was awaiting the daily March of the Boxes. Once, sometimes twice a day, our mailman would trek up the walk, arms laden with Priority Mail packages. Every day was like Christmas.
I also lived for my eBay “feedback.” That’s the feature where buyers and sellers rate one another and leave little messages about how the transaction went. I was, according to my new cyberpals, “a great pleasure to deal with,” “highly recommended,” “A+++++,” “a great person,” “funny,” “friendly,” “responsible,” a “prompt payer” and “super all-around eBayer.”
I felt like Sally Field at the Oscars. All these nice, virtual strangers, stroking my ego and bolstering my self-esteem. Naturally, I returned the compliments. They were a great bunch, these eBayers. And they sure beat the heck out of editors calling to pester me about deadlines. Which, I had to admit, I was missing right and left.
One day, as I was comparing the merits of two nearly identical, vintage plastic pineapple-shaped ice buckets (think tiki bar), my friend Mary, who writes about the Internet and spends most of her life on-line, e-mailed. She was doing an article about a Web site dealing with on-line addictions. Perhaps, she suggested, I should take a peek at the site. On-line auctions, these Web folk claim, can be addictive. There are shrinks who treat the problem. And there’s a handy checklist for those who suspect they might be on-line auction junkies. I gave it a look and, well, all right, I had a few symptoms, but I certainly hadn’t “committed a criminal act” to fund my habit, nor did I “ignore personal hygiene” or feel “empty, depressed and irritable” when not on-line. Compared with some eBayers, I was a mere dabbler. I heard about a woman who confessed that she’s glad her daughter is leaving for college; mom needs the extra bedroom for her eBay bounty. And take my pal Francis, a photographer who collects old photos and other things related to his trade. He has it rigged so he gets paged every time he has been outbid on an auction. Now that, I’d say, is just plain nutty.
One day several weeks into my eBay compulsion, I pulled myself away from the computer long enough to go to a real live flea market. I went partly because I wanted a kid’s brass bed frame (big, heavy and tough to find on eBay) and partly out of guilt, because I’d heard eBay was kicking some non-virtual sellers in the wallet.
I don’t doubt it. Real-life junk and antique hunting–thrill that it is–requires fortitude. I had to get dressed and into the car on a wickedly cold May morning. Upon arrival I endlessly cruised the stalls, hoping to find that bed and perhaps even unearth some randomly perfect treasure that would scream, “Buy me!” Three hours later I returned to the parking lot shivering, empty-handed and frustrated.
With eBay, you don’t even need to get out of your pajamas. You turn on the computer and ask it to find you stuff. Lazy, yes. Efficient, too.
For instance, 10 years ago my father’s wallet was stolen, and with it one of his most prized possessions: his 1942 Cub Scout card. He’d carried it forever, and would gleefully pull it out when paying cash for big-ticket items like rental cars and the clerk demanded additional identification.
For years, I’d had no luck finding a replacement. Even the Boy Scouts of America brass couldn’t help. But eBay, well, it goes places the Boy Scouts can only dream about. Every couple of days I typed “My Cub Card” into the eBay search. Finally, after a month, I hit paydirt. A guy on the West Coast had one, from 1942 no less. Six days and $5.95 later, it was mine. See?
I bragged incessantly about my growing e-bounty, to the extent that eventually, friends grew weary of me. Deirdre demanded to know how I, who shun the mass mentality, could get so sucked into “this blasted weird shopping-channel ‘party.’ “
“You are like a gambler at the slot machines in the Vegas airport,” she ranted. “And the way you thrive on that feedback. You–probably for the first time in your life–are a first-rate Girl Scout on your best behavior. Because if you let your chain-smoking, wine-chugging hair down, no seller would want you.”
This, from a woman who recently shelled out 2,000 smackers for a vacuum cleaner and thinks she’s got both oars in the water. Never mind that she absolutely loved the pink elephant cocktail stirrers that were her birthday present courtesy of my eBay expertise.
My sister Andrea called to take her shot shortly after I had lost a vintage dancing pink elephant cocktail shaker to someone with a fatter wallet.
“One day you are going to snap,” she predicted. “You will hunt down and cause serious bodily harm to someone who has outbid you. And when the inevitable happens, and the reporters show up on your doorstep, I will hand out pictures of you in happier times and then tell them exactly where you went bad.”
A few weeks ago, I dreamed that my nearest and dearest had decided to stage an intervention to break my eBay habit. They hauled me in front of a man in a black cape who demanded that, as part of my therapy, I go to eBay and sell back every item I had ever purchased. Furthermore, I was not to bid ever again. To ensure this, a woman came into the room and implanted an electronic doohickey into my fingertips which, if I even so much as grazed the “Bid!” key, would trigger ear-splitting alarms. The man in the cape would come and haul me off to a very bad place for life, with no chance of parole.
In the dream, I got down to my last item, a glass candy dish. As the bidding entered the last minute, I noticed one eBayer frantically topping all comers, raising the price until the dish was selling for a whopping $376. It occurred to me that if I placed a bid–something ridiculously high, say $700–I would both win my own auction and save someone who clearly had lost the plot. But then, of course, I would be toast.
I woke up in a panic, although I know deep down that I wouldn’t have saved that other bidder. Besides, that woman was clearly a lost cause.
Not me, though. I can quit any time I want.
