Shell Out

Part 5: eBay, or Desperate Measures

            Greg stood before court to deal with his traffic citation the same day his rent was due. It was doubly painful because he still hadn't found a job to replace his last one. He had searched high and low for someone to break him out of his financial funk, but none were looking for a guy with his qualifications. Some had given reasons. Most hadn't. Of the ones who'd spoken, the managers had remained polite, the same way a doctor would remain polite when telling his patient that his cancer has spread throughout his body. They hadn't necessarily thought he was useless; they just couldn't afford to train him. Something about saving face while the economy was still tolerable. A few had also considered testing him, but they had been willing to offer him only minimum wage doing things that degraded him as a human being, like sign spinning. Even then they had humored him. They really hadn't been interested in paying him to do anything. In the end, he was visibly unskilled in most applications, according to his job history, and no one had believed he was competent to prevent setting fire to their businesses. So Greg was forced to sweat his moment of financial fleeting as the judge banged the gavel and ordered him to pay the cashier. Of course, he asked for a job on the way out, but the judge offered him an odd glance instead.

            After signing and dating both checks, Greg sat in his famished-looking bedroom, staring at his seven-year-old computer that a friend had sold him for less than a hundred dollars. He had a couple of basic programs installed and a cheap Internet service running off banners and pop-ups, but no real drive to use it. He had tried to get established once by setting up an e-mail account with some company promising him free storage but realized a month too late that free storage had essentially meant no more than ten e-mails at a time — including junk mail. After the tenth message he was charged ten cents for each additional message and twenty cents for anything that came with an attachment. The friend who had sold him the computer had warned him about the scammer e-mailing company the following month after many complaints had stacked against them, but by then it was too late and he owed them an additional fifty dollars. After that incident Greg vowed to never use e-mail again, but his friend signed him with another, more reputable company called AOL, and his problems seemed to have lessened a bit.

            As he contemplated his future and the moves required for him to reach it, he thought of an option that sounded foolproof. People at school had discussed openly time and again about an online trading company called eBay, talking about how a member could buy and sell nearly anything for any price. Some students had made a living selling crap on eBay, stuff like model ships, unopened packs of Garbage Pail Kids, and old baseball gloves. One guy had even paid for his entire semester by selling his dad's mint-condition set of encyclopedias. It made Greg curious about eBay's mechanics and how he could make the system work to his advantage.

            When he stared at his blank monitor, he envisioned before him a huge marketing empire that could rescue him from his financial nightmare. As his eyelids grew heavy and his cheeks tightened, he concentrated hard on the screen, focusing on the random shapes in his mind. He knew his eyes were playing tricks on him, but he didn't care. He could actually see the buildings of success rising toward him. The image looked like that computer game he had seen his neighbor playing a few nights earlier when he went to borrow a bath towel, SimCity 4. Through eBay, his future rise from poverty would become like that computerized city. And he would become its mayor. What he had learned from his classmates was going to set him free. Looking to capitalize on this information he resolved to turn on his computer, find this eBay place, and transform his hard-earned assets into pure gold. The plan was foolproof.

            His first inclination was to call up a search engine and type in the word ebay, but he figured the company had probably named its Web site after itself, so he typed it in the address bar instead, followed by the famed dot com. After a minute or so of page loading, the site miraculously appeared in his monitor and Greg's hopes for financial liberation finally came true. He saw before him a homepage filled with membership requests and info about how best to navigate the sales world.