The realisation that I'd probably made a mistake in the bidding process had me exceptionally concerned tonight.
I've just put a new motherboard and cpu in my PC. By "new" I actually mean second-hand but still superior to what I had in there before. I had a P3-450 overclocked to run at 504mhz, but with the "less obsolete" motherboard, I was able to successfully install a P3-600E Coppermine CPU.
The motherboard can handle 3 lots of memory. I have 3x 128mb RAM, which is 384Mb in total. But it can also have 3x 256mb RAM.
So I went to ebay to check out the price for 2nd hand 256mb RAM. The price seemed to level out between $40-$50 each. Some guy in Raymond Terrace was auctioning off 5 lots of 256mb RAM and the price, when I bidded, was around $8.
So I decided to do a tactic I have done before - rather than bid every few hours or so, I put in my maximum bid and sat back to see what happened. I put a $30 bid on each of the 5 lots of memory.
That was two days ago. At around 6.30 tonight I suddenly remembered that I had placed a bid on these things, but hadn't had an email to say that I was outbid. I logged in to ebay, hoping that there was still quite a bit of time left.
Less than 4 hours to go, and I was winning each of the 5 lots of memory. The price had climbed to $28.55.
Oh dear.
I made a mental calculation - $150 for 5 sticks of memory. I'm not even sure I need even one - I was just making a low bid on the off chance that I would get a bargain. Now my strategy was backfiring.
Every 10 minutes I would come back to the computer to see if there were any emails notifying me that I had been outbid. Nada. Nothing.
I then began to make plans. What if I purchased three of them and then paid the guy $20 for the trouble I put him through for not paying for the other two? Ebay relies upon people making competent bids, so this would certainly affect my reputation as a buyer.
But then - at 7.15 tonight - I received one email. I had been outbid on one of them - $30.05. Whew! At least my mistake would cost $30 less. 5 minutes later, another three emails came informing me of $30.05 bids on three others. As I was investigating these, the final email came. I had been outbid by a whole series of $30.05 bids.
I'm sort of wondering whether the same person made bids on each, hoping that I would bid more in return. Fat chance pal.
I'll keep tabs on the rest of the bidding tonight to see how they go.
Update:
Four of the bids were won by kasan693, for $30.05, $30.05, $30.05 and $32.05. The other was won by hug161 for $31.05. It was too close for comfort for me. I'll have to do more research next time. Given that kasan693 bid up to $32.05 on the 4th item, it probably means he was after more than one. Nevertheless, I am wondering if there is some guy sitting there at the moment cursing his bad luck.
From the Blogososphere Department
© 2005 Neil McKenzie Cameron, http://one-salient-oversight.blogspot.com/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
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