So as a computer literate guy with a lot of money…I buy a lot of stuff on Ebay. Big surpise there, huh? I don’t buy huge things, but I buy maybe one thing a week. Widely varying stuff and I never have a problem.

In fact, the only thing that REALLY bothers me about Ebay is when some guy tries to rip you off by charging you $35 shipping on something that we all know costs $15 to UPS. I have a lot of respect for people who don’t do this. Recently I bought a pair of studio monitors (small-ish speakers) and the guy charged me $15 to ship them. Hell, I think he LOST a few bucks on them. Sometimes I even sell stuff. A while back I sold an old mountian bike and it cost me $18 to ship it to Brooklyn. In a bike box.

A whole mountain bike, dude! And you’re trying to tell me it costs $20 to ship a fucking iPod??

Anyway this story is about one particular seller I tried to buy a small electronic component from. I should preface this by saying I have 100% positive feedback on an Ebay account that is 5 years old. Not 98%, not 95%…100% positive. The reason for this is because I’m a nice, easy going guy and I always pay in advance by PayPal.

So, today I click on the Buy It Now link of this person and I send them their cash. A while later they tell me that they’ve decided that this is a high risk item and can only be sent to my billing address. I find this absurd for many reasons. First, because they already have the money, what could happen? Second, because the thing only costs $100. I mean I know $100 is $100 but this is a whole online store. I can understand billing address being needed for like a $5000 purchase, but $100? Which I explained politely. They replied with some blunt copy and paste about fraud. I then responded as below:

“Why do you guys have to be retarded about this? You know it’s $106?? I’m not asking you to ship me a fucking $5000 Rolex. Ship it to whichever address you want. But know I’ll never buy anything from you again and you’re getting some bad ass feedback”

Okay, no, not polite but this is how they replied:

“How dare you use foul language at me. Completely outrageous, uncalled for an illegal. can be construed as harassment via email.”

This made me laugh. You can imagine the profanity laden tirade I responded with! I nearly wore out the F, U, C and K keys on my keyboard. I mean really? Harassment? Illegal? Please. I pointed out that she could kiss my ass and I’d happily pay her legal bills for suing me for harassment.

So then I got this:

“we will be turning you into ebay as a non paying bidder. If you email us again we will immediately turn in all your correspondence to the authorities as well as your ISP for using their network to make harassing emails. Again, DO NOT EMAIL US AGAIN!!!”

So can you guess if I emailed them again? If you answered “FUCK yeah!” you’re right. And it’s not like they could really turn me in. I paid them via PayPal in advance. Plus let’s just say I pay my ISP about enough to buy a new Toyota Yaris each month in bandwidth so…I’m not worried.

But THEN the chick writes back to me again:

“Again I am imploring you to NEVER EMAIL US AGAIN!!! I have specifically told you I am offended by your emails and to never email us again and yet you continue to do so. YES, this is illegal. GO AWAY!”

What is wrong with people? I mean really, it’s not illegal to be an asshole. But I kinda think I’m in the right here. They kept my $106 too! (But not for long…stay tuned.) Anyway I was bored by this point so I wrote back to her telling her to stop f-ing emailing me unless it was to give me a refund.