Ebay refractometer curse

[Delphinus]

I would guess the vast majority of ebayyers are a fairly honest bunch. The few times I've bought or sold on ebay it's been perfectly straightforward.

I have a few rants though..

1) Particularly more so lately than when it first came up, it's just hard to bid on an item anymore. With people sniping auctions or online agents or what. I'll think I'm happily at the top bid on an item for like a week or two, then suddenly get outbid in the last 30 seconds. Not cool.

2) Paypal. Man everything is just paypal this or paypal that these days. Argh! As a former victim of identity theft (hoo yeah, nothing like having collection agencies call you at 2 in the morning to verbally abuse you .. "Do you LIKE being negligent on your bills?" "For crying out loud it's 2AM AND YOU HAVE THE WRONG PEOPLE!" "Oh yeah right" .. ), I *refuse* to hand over my banking info over to a company that's based in a different country than where I live. And their little extortion tactic to force to me do so (ie. $1000 spending limit, doesn't matter if I pay the bills, it just goes down and down), is just incomprehensibly vile and offensive to me. It used to be the case that Canadians could get their coveted "validated" status by using a codeword on a CC statement, but not anymore. Well ... They can rot, if it was good enough for my friends to get validated that way, but not for me nowadays .. then they can take their service and stuff it. I just wish there was another way... I figure I'll have to sign up for a disposable bank account and sign over the info to that one to get my status. I just have to .. well you know .. actually go and do that some day.

Oh well. I do enjoy looking at some of the junk that goes up for sale on that site. Lots of cool stuff there.


Have you thought about checking J&L or Ocean Aquatics for a refractometer?