Pure Digital Thought

I’ve been looking to perhaps upgrade this server to something other than the crummy little box it’s running on. I have an older dual 433Mhz CPU system but the ABIT BP6 motherboard is dead. It’s one of those boards that was affected by that rash of bad capacitors in the late 90s. I decided perhaps I could just buy a new board on eBay for cheap. I went over to eBay and I find several boards for a good deal. “Awesome”, I think. But after being quickly outbid on the first board, I decided to camp the auction until 12:15am just before the auction ended.

At 12:10am, I entered my first bid. Outbid. So, then I enter my second. Outbid. I then start rapidly entering each next dollar up to find the highest bid. Unfortunately, when I got to $71.00 (which was only 6 bids away), I entered 71,00 instead of 71.00. Now, on a keyboard, the ‘,’ and ‘.’ are right next to each other so that is actually extremely easy to do. I didn’t notice the ‘,’ so I hit submit. I got highest bidder but then I nearly crapped myself when I saw what eBay took my bid to mean. It actually *moved* the comma to 7,100 which made my bid 100x the amount I actually meant to bid. Thankfully, the bid was won at $162.99 but I still was sure as hell not paying that much for a board worth only about $60.

I frantically looked for the retract a bid form on eBay. I found it and retracted with a few minutes to spare. I then we back to see what the hell happened when I noticed the comma in the number I entered. WTF?! I send a note to eBay about it and this is the response I got…… crap, GMail is down again! Okay, I’ll post the response later.

Anyway, I got a retarded response telling me that the bid couldn’t be retracted because the auction had ended. I wrote back a mail trying to restate the obviousness especially since I had said in my original note that I had retracted my bid already and I was just reporting a bug. I get another stupid reply about how eBay will in fact interpret 71,00 as 7,100. What the hell? So, eBay actually takes money and decides to play around with it? This is what happens when you get a person who has 1/8 of a brain but is working the no-brain-pick-a-category-auto-response job. They try to think, but the thought goes only so far as, “Yeah, it will do that”. I gave one last ditch effort to suggest perhaps eBay should put up an error message saying that 71,00 is not correctly formatted and eBay doesn’t know if I meant to bid 7,100 or 71.00. There are a dozen ways this could be implemented to make it dummy friendly. But, I still haven’t heard back from eBay. Do be careful if you actually go there to bid. God only knows on what amount eBay thinks you should be bidding.