eBay

I am a scrapbooker. I occasionally go to eBay to see what is out there in the scrapbooking category. I'm not very good at the bidding game, but I have bought something.

Yesterday I bid on a cartridge for my Cricut machine. It has all the 50 states on it. I keep a scrapbook of the places Geneo and I travel to, so I thought this would be something I would really use. I placed my bid realizing the bidding wouldn't be over until 9 o'clock this morning. I thought I would check it again just before nine and try to slip in a bid if I needed to. I got an email confirming I had the highest bid.

Of course, this morning I forgot all about it until about 9:30. I was bummed, but decided to check to see how much it sold for. To my delight, it was 9 o'clock Pacific time, which meant I had another couple of hours to go. Just to play it safe, I put in the maximum I would pay for the cartridge so that I wouldn't have to keep watching it. I still had the highest bid. Life was good!

Just before the time was up, I checked on the item, and I still had the highest bid. I was excited. I watched the time elapse and the seconds tick away. Finally, it was 10, 9, 8, (I'm ready to celebrate!) 7, 6, 5 - and then the bid changed to $1 more than my highest bid and I didn't have time to respond! This nice little message popped up to inform me I had been outbid!! AWK!!!

How do those people do that??? There must be a science to eBay bidding. I went to Geneo's shop to tell him of my disappointment and his response was "hmmm; I guess you will have to try again". (His compassion was overwhelming.)

I told myself to forget it and move on, but now the bug had bitten me. Sure enough, I went back to eBay, found another 50 states cartridge and bid on it. Now the waiting game starts all over again. There is a lot of pressure to this eBay thing. I'm nor sure I'm cut out for it.