The computer, for many years, has been my refuge.  I’ve used it for everything, from games through research and study to productivity.  I can (and have) created web sites, books, ‘artistic’ images, programs, etc., and I have spent countless years surfing the web, or playing games.

Now, though…  Well, decent games for the PC are rare, and when they do release a decent game, you can only play it if you install some form of DRM, too.  (DRM = Digital Rights Management system)  I have no major problems with software companies wanting to prevent piracy, I understand it – but not when it comes at the cost they expect us to bear!

ALL DRM software requires you to register yourself with them, then register the game.  And once a game is registered, you cannot sell it.  And the DRM has the right to disable the game, too.  So you buy the game; get annoyed at being killed at the same point every single time and decide to cheat; cheat; and find that the cheat you used is classed as an ‘illegal modification’ of the software – so they disable the game.

Yeah.  You don’t own the game when you buy it – you own the right to play the game provided you play it exactly how ‘they’ say you will play it.  Or they’ll take their ball back and leave you standing alone in the middle of the empty field.

So, games are no longer available to me.  What about the internet?  Well, it seems that half of all websites now have adopted the ‘annoy the hell out visitors’ policy.  I’m talking about ‘pop-ups,’ of course.

You don’t know what I mean?  You’ve not seen one?  Yes, you have, I guarantee it. 

I’m going to do something I don’t normally do – I’m going to ask you to visit a couple of websites.  We’ll start with ebay.  (If you are already a user of ebay, this next bit will probably not work for you – as you’ve already been through it.)

Go to ebay.co.uk, and in the menu on the left of the page, select ‘Electronics.’  After the page changes, select Computers/Tablets/Networks and wait, then select Laptops and netbooks.  (Yes, there is a quicker way of doing it, but some of my readers won’t understand it.)  You are now looking at a list of laptops that are available.  If you look just above the list, on the right, you will see that it says ‘Sort by:’ followed by a drop-down selection box that contains ‘Best Match.’  Click on this drop-down, and change it to ‘Price + P&P: lowest first.’  You now have a pop-up, that asks for your postcode.

Silly of me, but this annoys me.  I’m looking at a UK site.  I’m interested in goods IN THE UK.  Since when did you have to pay a different postage rate in different parts of the UK?

But that’s beside the point.  The point here is to demonstrate a pop-up.  I now see them on more sites than not.  They are there for various ‘reasons’ ranging from showing the contents of your ‘shopping basket’ to asking you to take part in a survey.  Almost all of them, however, are there for the same purpose: to get your data, or to advertise a product.

Prior to making this post, I turned on the computer to perform a few simple tasks: check for email on two accounts, check what todays ‘deal of the day’ is for Kindle, and try to find a cheat for a game.  Within five minutes of starting (no exageration there) I was so annoyed at the number of pop-ups that I decided to see if I could find a way to stop them.

So I looked them up, and found the second website I’m going to ask you to look at.  http://popup-toolkit.com/

This is a site selling a toolkit for making the pop-ups, and you immediately see the worst kind: a box that bounces around and insists on getting your attention.  The page is a testament to bad design, and lack of moral or ethical values.

I won’t ask you to read the whole thing, but…  The very start of the real text is a set of bullet points. 

• Have you felt the need to advertise your products and at the same time make the advertisement a pleasant experience for your visitors?
• Have you thought of a really enjoyable way of expressing your offers to the users and thus increase multiple times your sales, your subscribers, your commissions and your PROFITS?
• Have you ever asked yourself “Is there a way to present my products and services in a likable way from the user’s point of view?”

OK, sounds good.  If I was trying to sell a product on my webpage, I would want visitors to my site to like what I do.    Now, look just a little bit further down the page, to where it tells you the ‘Main features shown in examples follow:’  (Sorry about the grammar, but that’s the way they’ve written it.)

Look at those features.  Look how they stress the fact that these pop-ups are ‘fully unblockable.’   How ‘The new Intelligent Heuristic Algorithm will Open the Unblockable DHTML Popup JUST when the visitor is trying to leave your web site.’

So the pop-ups come at exactly the point when a site visitor has decided they’ve had enough:  When you try to leave the website – up comes screen with another advert, or asking you why you’re leaving, or just to tell you to never come back.

Well, they don’t have to tell me.  Every time I go online, I add another website to the list of those to avoid.  Sadly, though, I can’t avoid them all – because my email service, Amazon, and my bank all use them.

Which leaves me with only one course of action.  Stop using the internet.  And if I stop using the internet, I can’t blog.  Which is why I haven’t posted so frequently.

It’s sad, really.  The internet was started by enthusiasts.  Anybody could join in, anybody could create a website about anything.  And we paid to do it.  We paid for the network, we paid for the internet to be built.

And then the businesses moved in.

Now, the businesses are complaining that the internet we paid for, for our purposes, is not fast enough or ‘big’ enough for all their adverts!

A few years ago, I played a thing called ‘Second Life.’  It was great: it was a wide open world, where you could own virtual land and build whatever you wanted on it.  You could create literally anything in the world.  And it was a world – without limits.  You could fly.  You could walk, dance, drive…   There was an economy.  I sold my own designs, I bought goods from other players, I had a job which paid well.  The currency used in the game could be traded for real money, which was part of the downfall…

Because businesses noticed the number of ‘customers’ available, and moved in.  I remember a conversation with a businessman I met, one of the first to establish a presence.  He said ‘things will have to change now that businesses are getting interested.’  I told him that those ‘changes’ would drive most customers away – but he didn’t care, as long as he could make money off the ones that were left.

And that’s the problem.  We now have an internet where ‘business’ is more important than me, you, or the cat. 

As long as we accept our place at the bottom of the food chain, all will be well.  And I’m tired of being the only one fighting it.

Strangely enough, as I sit here and write this, I find myself unable to remember what the business was in the business of, but that’s unimportant.  What is important is the fact that they wanted me to go to their shop and look at their goods.

Only they forget to tell me where the shop was!

Yes, I could ask somebody; I could visit their website and find out (they remembered to put that in the ad); I could look them up online; I could find them in the telephone book.  But why should I?   Why should I put in any effort, at all, in order to visit them and give them my money?

They want me there, they can make it easy for me, and tell me where to go.  Or I’ll tell them where to go…

This is a fairly common thing, now.  I’ve seen adverts that fail to even tell you what town, county, or even country the business exists in.  Maybe, in the world of the internet, it’s just not considered essential any more?

After all, we can just use the web browser built into our smart phone and look them up, can’t we?  Or make a twit of ourselves by asking on boobtube.  Social networking sites exist simply so we can ask each other about these things, after all.

Maybe that’s the idea?  Maybe, they deliberately leave out something important like that, so that people will twitter on about it…  That way, idiots will talk about their business, making other idiots wonder what they’re talking about, bringing in more idiots, and so on.

That’s it!  It’s a deliberate ploy to gather attention!  And I fell into the trap!  Oh no….

Oh.  Hang on.  You have no idea what the business concerned is, do you?  I forgot to mention it at the start of the post…

Some people think I’m as daft as I look, you know.

• At the 2010 general election, the voting turnout was around 66% on average.
• The ‘winning’ (Conservative) party got 36% of the votes; the third placed Liberals got 23%.

OK.  Con and Lib formed a coalition, and had 59% of the total votes between them, so they formed the government.  But… hold on… (counts on fingers) that means that they got 59% of the 66% who voted… which works out at under 37% of the population!

Broadly speaking, on the day of the election, only one person in three wanted the government we have!   I find that mind-boggling, personally – that our ‘elected government’ was only elected by a third of the voters…

Why don’t we have a system where the other two-thirds can get rid of them?  I thought that was the idea of democracy, after all – that the majority rules?

One of the leaflets about alternative voting explained it quite well: it talked about a group of friends deciding where to go.  Some wanted this pub, some wanted that pub, others wanted a third pub, and four wanted coffee.  So they went for coffee, because no four people could agree on the same pub.  That’s politics today – we all have coffee, because we can’t agree on a pub.   Or, we have a lousy government because we can’t agree on an alternative.

Sigh.

Right.  Let’s look at the government we do have.  The majority of them went to the same school; they all know the same people; they all attend the same events… With one or two exceptions, you could take any MP, swap them with any other MP, and never notice the difference.

Yes, we have two main parties, each in opposition with the other – but that is essentially the same as two houses in a school competing for a trophy in a debating match: it makes no difference which house wins it, the trophy never leaves the school!

A recent news story was about VAT on pasties.  This is something that is still rippling across the world – there was a story just yesterday about a group of americans bringing over a petition they had signed in defense of the cornish delicacy.  (I love my pasties!) 

MP’s are totally confused by the issue – they just don’t see what the fuss is about.  Well, fellas, let me put it in terms you will understand: the government has just decided to charge you 20% more for your caviar and champagne, for no apparent reason….

Get it, now?

Most of our politicians have no idea whatsoever what it is like to live a ‘normal’ life.  Normal, for them, is choosing which house to sleep in tonight; or where to go for their next month of tropical vacation.  Their normal is five course dinners and £500 bottles of wine – one for each course, that is.

Our normal is having to choose between paying for one house, or paying for one meal – and maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to afford a weeks holiday in a B&B.

What they spend on wine for one meal is more than I have spent on holidays in the last few years combined!

MP’s are supposed to represent us.  How can they do that, when they inhabit a totally different world? 

They are not ‘better’ than us; they are not ‘smarter’ than us; they are not superior to us in any way – they are simply lucky enough to have rich parents.  Money is the only difference between us.

Take an infant from a ‘slum’, swap them with a prince, send them to the ‘right’ schools, and you would have a ‘captain of industry’ capable of running the country.  Yet that same child, if it never left the slum, would be considered lucky to reach the age of 25 without a criminal record – and would be extremely lucky to get a job at McDonalds. 

Our politicians, our masters, firmly believe that they should rule us because they were born to it, but it’s not the birth that matters – it’s the opportunities.

And when we have a government made up of people who never got the chance to go to the posh schools, we might finally have a government that understands why putting tax on pasties is a bad idea.

Well, I can dream about it, anyway.

Let me give you an example.  Smartphones.  Everybody has a smartphone now.  Why?  Because ‘everybody has a smartphone’ of course.  We hear that phrase, and wonder why we’re the only ones that don’t have a smartphone, so we go out and buy one.

At no point do we actually think about whether we need one, or even want one – we just ‘know’ that we have to have one.  So we buy one, and put it in a drawer and forget about it.

The world is full of talk about ‘apps’ now.  There is an app for everything, apparently – including an app to tell you what apps everybody else is buying! 

Whenever you visit an online store (Amazon, for example)  they will tell you what other people are buying.  They have a section of every page reserved to tell you that ‘customers who bought this item also bought…’  and one that tells you what items are frequently bought at the same time, and one that tells you what people bought instead of it.

We are expected to buy what they tell us to buy, when they tell us to buy it.  We are expected to disengage our brains, and hand over our money.

Well, I refuse.

It’s a very simple procedure, actually.  All you have to do is ask yourself ‘would I buy this if I’d never heard of it before?’  If the answer is ‘no’, then don’t buy it. 

Don’t buy things just because your friends have one; or because you saw one on Eastenders; or because the advert looked good.  Buy one because it’s exactly what you have been looking for, and you’ve looked at all the alternatives, and it’s the best you can afford that does everything you want.

In other words: think.

Don’t be just another sheep, in a nation of sheep.

If you don’t think we’re sheep, stand in a supermarket for a while.  Find an aisle where there is a display or basket restricting the space available, and wait.  Ten minutes at most will do it – you will, I guarantee, see somebody park their trolley in the narrow gap, and be joined by several others.  They will huddle together, like sheep when a wolf is around: safety in numbers, you see.  (Again, lack of thinking it through: the idea of this is that having more targets to choose from will confuse the wolf, and that if there are more targets there is a lesser risk of you being the one the wolf gets.  Trouble is, a flock of sheep is a far more attractive target than one sheep, and the wolf has a much better chance of dinner when there are a lot of sheep to chase…  Lunge for one sheep alone, and miss, and you have to chase it; lunge for one sheep in a flock, and miss, and you can simply lunge for the next one.)

(Why do I keep getting diverted from the point?)

Smartphones; facepalm; twittube; youbook… whatever the latest trend is.  They are all profiting from a total lack of thought among their users.  Every time a new one comes along; every time a new video of a celebrity doing something they shouldn’t is ‘leaked’; it is referred to as ‘going viral.’  By which they mean that it spreads across the internet like a virus: everybody who views it tells five friends, who tell five friends, etc.

Since when was spreading a virus a good thing?  Since when was telling the world what you had for breakfast even remotely interesting?  Why should people care that a ‘celebrity’ was just seen going into a McDonalds on Main Street, Nowhereville? 

Please, people, think for yourselves.  Regardless of what some movie star, or singer, or politician, or celebrity, or whatever, may think or say or do - make up your own mind.  Don’t buy this phone, or that car, just because somebody you don’t know, have never met, and never will meet, tells you to.  Buy it because you have thought about it.

Funny thing is: if you do think about it, you won’t buy it.

There  are sites, now, that boast of selling for ‘larger ladies,’ ‘plus size’ seems to be a catchphrase – but, sadly, they think that you stop putting weight on when  you reach size 34!  Unless you’re a man, that is…  I’ve found several sites that will sell me men’s clothing in the size I want.

As an amusing side issue, I have found a site that sells womens clothing in the size I want.  They even have a coat for sale.  And if I ever want to buy fetish gear, that’s the place I’ll go – but right now, I’m not in the market for a leather dominance outfit with chain accessories, sorry.

Once more, the search engines are getting in the way of my searching, of course.  Why a search for ‘UK ladies 5XL coat’ should want to have me looking at a mans coat in the wrong size on an american store is, frankly, beyond me.  At least it was a coat… oh, hang on, they called it a jacket.

So, it seems, a woman can only have a coat that fits if they are a man, kinky, or american. 

I’m close to the point of commissioning a factory to make a job lot of coats in the size I want, and selling the spares on ebay – but ebay doesn’t consider ‘size’ to be a criteria upon which people will search for clothes.  Colour, style, brand, material, etc., yes – but not the size.  Apparently, buyers don’t care what size they buy, as long as it’s the right colour.

The bigger you are, the less choice you have.  Which annoys me.  If I do commission my own clothing range, it will start at 20+ and go upwards.  And when a size zero complains that we don’t stock their size, I’ll send them an apple – that should be enough to increase their stick figure to something you can actually see!

As a nation, we are getting bigger: obesity is commonplace, today.  Statistics show that well over half the population is overweight or obese.  HALF.  Yet 90% of the clothes made will only fit the other half. 

Companies seem to think that it’s a good idea to only sell to the half that is not overweight.  Idiots.

There is the stupid idea that (forgive me for putting it this way, please) ‘fat girls don’t wear fashionable clothes.’  And, well, I must admit that they have a point.  It is true, after all.  I mean, how can they wear them, if you don’t make them?

Why should larger ladies be forced to spend hours searching for websites that might sell the item they want in the size they need?  Why do all the shops just refuse to stock larger sizes? 

Why do the shops that boast of stocking larger sizes only stock the smaller end of the range?

And why is it OK for a man to be that size, but not a woman?

Let’s start with Good Friday.  If you are of a Christian upbringing, you were probably taught that Good Friday is the anniversary of the day that Christ was crucified.  I’m not going to argue that, nor am I going to point out that nobody actually knows what date it was – there are actually many differing opinions.

No, I’m going to question the name.  If you believe in God, and Jesus, etc. – and if you don’t, why are you celebrating Easter? – then, please, I implore you, tell me what on earth is good about mankind brutally murdering the son of God?

‘He died for our sins,’ I hear some of you say.  And is that in any way fair, I reply.  Is that ‘good’?  If He had volunteered for crucifixion – taken somebody else’s place, maybe – then I can see why it might be ‘good.’  Well, why He might be thought good, anyway – but not us, for killing him.

OK. Moving on a little.  ‘On the third day, he arose.’  (Maybe not the exact wording, but you get the point.)  So, three days after he died, he walked out of the ‘grave’ and walked among us, again.  For this reason, we also celebrate Easter Sunday, by the giving and receiving of chocolate eggs.

Pardon?

Oh, I’m ignoring the chocolate egg thing – that’s just too absurd for me to bother with.  No, I’m confused about the ‘third day’ thing.  The third day after Friday is Monday, surely?  Count with me: Saturday, one; Sunday, two; Monday, three…

So, we celebrate his resurrection a day early.  Maybe that was brought in so we could get back to work on Monday?

Sadly, Easter shares the same problems as most religious holidays in our world: they have nothing to do with religion.

In our house, the only anniversay we recognise or celebrate are wedding anniversaries.  We ignore all others, be they religious, pagan, or capitalist.  (Just bear in mind here that there is no such thing as a religious celebration: christmas and easter are just pagan ones under a thin cloak of religion.)

I do have a suggestion, though.  Many times, my father has said that he prefers to celebrate unbirthdays over birthdays – as you get more of them in a year…  Why not apply that to christmas, easter, valentines day, mothers day, green tea day, shoelace day, whatever. 

Celebrate every day that isn’t supposed to be ‘special’ – you’ll find it much more fun.

Whatever the topic, I could – and did – quickly find the answer to almost any question I was asked.  I taught new computer owners how to use the internet – I sold computers after demonstrating the internet. 

All I had to do was ask the client what they were interested in, type it into a search engine, and within minutes show them websites containing information about their subject. 

The last time I tried to teach somebody how to use the internet, I spent half my time saying ‘oh, ignore that’ while I removed something that had popped up on screen.  It is now impossible to spend more than five minutes surfing the web without at least one unwanted window getting in the way.

My latest example, and it could well be the straw that broke my back, came while I was looking for a way to get past a certain point in a game.  My system is set to never open a new Internet Explorer window (a fact which it happily ignores) so when I noticed a second window open, I looked to see what it was.  Now, I did not look very closely (as I firmly believe that my attention to an advert should be inversely proportional to how determined the advertiser is – I’ll explain this below) at the content, but I know it bore no relation of any type to anything I had looked at. 

I clicked the close button, and instead of closing, the window popped an ‘are you sure?’ message up on the screen.  I didn’t bother to read the options, because they were lies – I used task manager to close the whole thing.  And every Internet window closed.

Their idea is simple: we are expected to buy computers and pay for internet access so that they can put adverts in front of us.  If we dare to close their adverts, they will punish us by preventing us from doing whatever it is we thought we were doing.  Rejecting adverts has not only caused programs to crash on my computer, it has also caused programs to die – refusing all attempts to ressurrect them.  It has even killed computers. 

Yes.  Removing adverts has caused my computer to stop working at all.

Most websites nowadays have adverts on them.  That is bad enough, but most of them also have the idea that the advert is the reason you visit their site: to the extent that the advert will pop up over the page content, and you have to interact with the advert before you can see the page you asked for.  You have to study the advert to find out how to get rid of it.  Well, you do – I just close the whole thing: any website that does that to me is not one I will waste time looking at.

Most websites, too, are plastered with ‘social networking’ tools.  Most popular of these is the one that expands to fill the window any time your mouse passes within a mile of it, making it impossible to see the webpage.

Most websites, when you click on a link to them, load as many as a dozen adverts before they even go the the page you asked for.  (Top left corner of Internet Explorer, next to the address bar, are three arrows: left facing for back; right facing for forward; and a little downward triangle for history.  If you click on the history arrow, it will show you the last ten or so pages loaded.  Check it a few times, and take note of how many times you see ‘googleads’ in the list.  Every one of those is an advert loaded onto your computer as part of a webpage.) 

The most annoying part of this, for me, is the fact that it is possible.  The idiots behind the web browsers made it possible.  Earlier browsers were not capable of displaying the popups; could not do the linking necessary for the social media garbage; could not accept cookies; could not accept third party links. 

In short, earlier browsers could do nothing beyond displaying a web page.

Is it just me, or do you think that is the whole point of them?  Most of the problems with webpages just were not possible ten years ago.  So they ‘upgrade’ the browsers to make the problems possible.  Why?  I have no answer for that.  I cannot think of a single instance where I’ve thought ‘oh, I’m glad they put that popup there.’  Can you?

I’ve even had my bank put a popup on their website – right over the most important part of the page.  Want to know your account balance?  You’ll have to thank me for telling you about this ISA first, even though you have never shown any interest in them at all.

Adverts should be passive.  They should be easy to ignore.  So the harder they make it for me to ignore them, the more determined to ignore them I become. 

If it’s a popup that ignores my ‘no popups’ setting, I’ll close it without looking at it.  If it’s one of those that you can’t close, that moves as you change the page so it’s always there, floating… I’ll close the page without looking at it.

If it opens a new browser window, I will close the window – without looking at the content.

Get that?  I will not look at the advert.

On a few occassions, I have found it impossible to get rid of the advert without looking at it.  Rarely, the advertiser achieves their purpose, and forces me to see what they are selling.  They may think this is a win.  They are wrong.

Congratulations!  You have now put your product/company on the list of those I will never, under ANY circumstances give any of my money to.  I don’t care what it is; I don’t care how much it costs.  It could be a guaranteed million pounds for the bargain price of one penny – I would not buy it.  It could be the cure for cancer; it could be the fountain of youth; it could be everything I’ve ever wanted, in a pretty box, tied up with a big bow.  You get the picture? 

Force me to become aware of your product, and that product will never be bought or used by me.

*Deep breath…*

Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.  Got away from the point.

The point is simple.  I can no longer find what I want on the internet, while at the same time I cannot avoid what I don’t want.  It is now far easier (and more accurate) to open my window and shout my question at whoever is passing. 

The internet, now, is no more than a data-mining advert.  Whatever you want to do requires you to give a website your personal information first.  You doubt me?  I have a Kindle, as you know.  And I would love to get the Harry Potter books on it.  Today, Amazon tells me that I can get them.   It’s a big thing, and they’re shouting about it.  All you have to do is go to the ‘Pottermore’ website and register…

Why?  Why the dickens do I need to REGISTER with J. K. Rowling before I can buy her books?  (Could it be so that I can be bombarded with ‘offers’ for ‘related goods’?)  Why is Amazon allowing this?  (Because they want the books to be available on Kindle, so they’ll do anything Rowling wants.)

Sorry, I want to buy the books so I can read them.  Full stop.  I never have been, and never will be, very interested in anything to do with the authors life.  If she writes another book, I may be interested in reading it – but if she buys a house, or moves a car, or has a new haircut (assuming she has hair, that is – I have no idea and less interest) I really don’t care.

I refuse to look at adverts, I refuse to register with websites, and I refuse to give any information without a very good reason.  Add that to the fact that I can no longer find any information when I need it, and the internet is useless.

I just wish I didn’t have so much of my life tied up with it – it’s going to be murder gettting seperated.

Every week, my partner and I make out a list, which I then take to the supermarket and fill.  It’s a very good system, as it makes us pretty immune to the sort of manipulation you see these days. 

I don’t stick blindly to the list, though:  I look out for the real bargains.  For instance, I have not bought teabags for months, as we’re still using the ones I got for half price.  I wouldn’t buy anything perishable (unless it had months before it was unusable) but if it’s an item we will buy soon, and it will keep until we need it, then I’ll grab it if it’s on offer.  (I only count real offers here: an item that is marked at ‘half price’ although they doubled the price just for the offer, is not a real offer, it’s just marketing.)

For weeks now, I’ve been wanting some McCoys crisps – we’ve almost run out of them – so I’ve been checking the price every time I went shopping.  It remained stable at £1.88 for a six pack, so I passed. 

This week, they’re on offer at £1 a six pack.  There was an end of aisle display, as there usually is for the offers, but the one we like was not there – they’d all gone.  (This is typical, of course: no supermarket in the history of shopping has ever thought ‘this is such a good offer, we’ll sell more than usual – better order extra.’)

As a reasonably intelligent person, I thought I’d do what I always do when I see these offers.  I checked the shelf where the item normally lives.  (Why?  Because I’ve known occassions where the ‘normal’ shelf had a better price than the offer, that’s why.)  On the shelf, there were five packs of the flavour I wanted – so I grabbed four of them, leaving one on the shelf.

Carrying on with my shopping, I parked my trolley close to the checkouts while I quickly gathered the last few small items – it’s quicker than trying to get a trolley through the crowds of idiots – then I went to the checkout to pay.

As I unloaded my trolley onto the conveyor, I realised that there were only three bags of McCoys.  Briefly, I wondered how I could make that mistake, then I had a clear memory of my two hands, each holding two bags as I put them in the trolley.  After a little more thought, I remembered something else: I saw a man looking in my trolley as I walked away from it.

Yes, somebody had walked up to my trolley, and taken a bag of crisps out of it! 

To make it even more… amusing?  Annoying?  Ridiculous?  I went back to the shelf, and picked up the last bag that I’d left there.

Now, I find myself wondering.  All those times when I’ve got home, and been unable to find an item that I was sure I’d bought – had he taken that out of my trolley, too? 

You might think I’m upset by this.  I’m not.  I’m actually very happy about it.

Next time I forget something, I can blame him for taking it!

In the spirit of objectivity, I will simply relate the events in order, without any editorialising.

There is a game I want, and I’ve been looking on ebay for it as the retail price is between £37 and £50 depending on where you shop.   Ebay prices are little better, and I’ve seen second hand go for £38+.  The typical price is in the twenties, which is more than I’m willing to pay.  I WILL get the game, and I will get it for the price I’m willing to pay – I may just have to wait a while…

Anyway.  I found a bundle of games on ebay, which included the game I really wanted.  Nine games in all, and I thought… ‘well, I would pay £15 for that one, if I pay £5 each for the others, that’s a good price…  so that’s eight times £5, plus £15 for the last one, that’s £55 in total.’ 

So I put in a bid, and I won the auction.  For £55 including delivery.  Bargain. 

Minutes after the auction ending, I paid for the games using PayPal – which was the only method the seller would accept.  The following day, I got an email from the seller, saying they would send the goods as soon as I paid.

‘I’ve paid,’ I replied.  Then I checked my account.  Yes, I had paid PayPal, but they had not paid the seller – because the email address was wrong.  I relayed this to the seller, and waited.

At this point, I must point out that it is impossible for me to have made a mistake with his email address: all the buyer does is click on a ‘pay now’ button, and ebay and PayPal do the rest.  At no point does the purchaser enter the email address, and there is no facility for you to change it, either.

The seller told me what the correct email address was, and I replied that that did not help, as there was no way for me to change where the money was sent. 

I contacted ebay, and they told me to request an invoice from the seller, which I did.  Then I waited two days.  Then I asked where my invoice was, and waited another day. 

Which brings us to today.  The seller sent me a simple message, stating that he had decided to withdraw the item, and would not be re-listing it.

(I was annoyed when I read this – but I got truly angry at the next bit.)

With very little effort, I discovered that the items had already been re-listed, and sold for £55! 

I have reported the swine to ebay, and I’ve emailed to say that I’m not surprised at his saying he would not be re-listing as he had already done so.

What I find truly puzzling about this is… He sold the items for £5 more than I bid on them – but he will have to pay the ebay fees on both transactions, and they will be at least £4 on each!  If he’s lucky, he’ll end up with a whole £1 more in his pocket.

How little value he places on his honour.  What sort of world is it where anything is okay, as long as you make a penny out of it?

The idea is that you can quickly see whether that product is worth buying, or not.  You can compare similar products, and – theoretically – choose the better one.

They are a total waste of time.

An item I looked at recently on ebay had a message for purchasers: they demanded that you only give them a 5/5 star rating, as anything else ‘was the same as negative feedback.’ 

Some time back, I took part in an online game where I played the role of a critic.  I was to read a movie screenplay, review it, and give it a rating out of ten.  So I read the first three, and gave the best of them a score of eight; the worst of them (so bad it was almost unreadable) got three; and the middle one I set as my baseline for future reviews and scored it at five.  It was, truly, average.  Not bad, but not really good, either.  The best of the three was quite good, but… if I gave it a ten, what would I give to a later screenplay that was better? 

The author who got the five was outraged – his view was that you needed a very good reason not to give a score of ten!

And that’s the attitude of most.  They want to know why they didn’t get a perfect score, and then they argue when you explain it to them.  The fact that the hero of the story is actually seen to die three times, in three different places, by three different methods is seen as nitpicking on your part.  The fact that spelling and punctuation are seen as optional is of no importance.  The fact that the Aston Martin car they sold was really a Robin Reliant is a misunderstanding.  And none of the above is grounds for them not getting a perfect score.

In a way, they are right.  Because most of the world has this damned stupid idea that average is good.  So as long as what you receive is close to what you ordered, you’ll give them 5 stars.  And that means that when you see that a product only has 4 stars, you look for one with 5 – totally forgetting that 3 stars is the real average. 

For my money, most of my transactions online deserve a 3/5 rating.  For that, I expect, no I demand that the item I buy is exactly as described, is adequately packed, and arrives in a reasonable time.  In short, I expect a businesslike attitude and service. 

You want the fourth star?  Go the extra mile: give me free delivery; put eleven items in instead of the ten I ordered; contact me to let me know the order is on it’s way and when it will arrive; deliver the goods by hand, even.  The fourth star is for service that stands out from the crowd.

The fifth star?  That is reserved for the truly exceptional service, and may never, ever, be awarded.

As for the one or two star service… well, putting me on a mailing list will reduce your score, as will misrepresenting your product, not sending the goods, and various other misdeeds.

But I’m the minority.  And when I give a 3 star rating I hear the screams.  So I compromise.  Most transactions get 4 stars, and I give 5 for anything above average – and I feel tainted by doing so.

The end result?  I don’t bother giving a rating, and take little notice of any rating system I encounter. 

What good is a ‘perfect’ score, when everybody has the same?