Wow – that was easy!  My first eBay sale. Like shouting into the mountains expecting maybe an echo, or maybe nothing at all, and instead hearing someone answer back. It wasn’t much (an old antenna I’d bought years ago for the Passat) but it proved the process works.

Why mess with eBay?  I’d bought a couple of things before and it had turned out well. Note the 100% positive rating (which frankly isn’t very hard to get as a buyer) which made me a potentially viable seller as well.  Dan told me how Elise’s dad sold most of his household junk that way and that seemed like an interesting way to get rid of lots of the junk I have lying around the house. It’s junk in the sense I don’t need it, but it’s perfectly good and it seems wrong to throw it away. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Maybe that should be eBay’s motto.

But the main reason is this extra Droid phone I have. Brand new. Dan bought his and Verizon had a ‘buy one get one free’ sale. How can a geek pass that up?  So the free phone cost me using my early upgrade, changing my contract so that all my future upgrades aren’t worth as much, and adding a $30/month data plan, and that’s not to mention all the time it would take fiddling with it.  That was two months ago and I have spent a grand total of about 5 minutes with it. The screen protector is still on.  At $30+$30 = $60 for two months of unlimited internet service, that’s $12./minute for the privilege of learning how to unlock it and send a text or two.

So I throw in the flag. Dan told me Droids sell for around $300. on eBay but I wasn’t about to risk screwing something up in my maiden sale of an expensive item so the antenna was a dry run. I set the auction at .99 so the listing would be free, chose a $5 ‘buy it now’ price after careful deliberation, went outside and snapped a couple of pictures using a beige tupperware cake carrier bottom for an attractive background, applied my new photoshop skills on making a collage (avoiding the $.50 charge for an extra picture), waded through a long set of options including choosing a $5 shipping charge and excluding sales from any country other than USA or Canada, and submitted it, hoping for a quick sale. I set the sale for 3 days, not really thinking about it, and then did some checking and found out the overwhelming opinion is that sales should end on a Sunday. Mine was ending on a Thursday. Tried to change the listing but found out I could only withdraw the item unless there had been bids on it, in which case I had to sell to the highest bidder. These and a couple of other realizations were all the reasons I put the antenna, not the Droid up for sale first.

I checked the listing every 10 minutes for the first hour before getting on to the next task for my day off, namely, replacing the toilet (see ‘My Champion’ below). After returning from Home Despot I ran over to the computer to find out that the item had sold! Some guy in Indiana just couldn’t resist. Now, I had to get it out to him fast so he would give me a favorable rating and so other people will think I am reputable and buy my Droid. An hour later it was boxed and mailed. I even made an extra $2.59 since shipping only cost $2.41.

So if the USPS does it’s job this momentous chapter will be complete. My college classmate Meg Whitman would be proud – maybe I’ll tell her if I see her at our 35th reunion. Or maybe not. She used her Princeton education to become CEO of eBay and possibly the next governor of California. I used mine to sell old antennas for $5. But I’m *her* customer now.