Imagine a country where there is no rule of law, where you might be scooped off the street without warning, put before a kangaroo court and sentenced to life in prison without parole and without right of appeal. You have no idea of the charge against you because no one in authority will tell you. You are innocent of any crime, except you don’t know what your crime is; the full might of the law has been brought down on your head and you have nowhere to turn.
What if this imaginary country was not in fact a nation state but a large, wealthy and powerful company? What if it was eBay?
Recently, I was asked by a friend if, in my capacity as a serious amateur photographer, I would look over and value some vintage cameras and lenses that he had inherited. After a little research I quickly ascertained that they were eminently sellable and that the best marketplace for them was eBay.
As my friend didn’t have an eBay account, I agreed to use my — mostly dormant — account to sell his pieces. I successfully sold an ancient cinematic lens to begin with and, happy with the result, decided to follow up with the more valuable of the two cameras, an early 1950s Nikon. Not being a regular habitué of eBay, I didn’t realise that there was a monthly limit in place and the balance left after the first sale left me with too little on my limit to proceed to the next.
Not a problem. I went into their chat service and passed a very easy ten minutes with a chap calling himself Gerald during which time he explained the rules, helped me link my PayPal account to my eBay account and satisfactorily ended with a 20-fold increase in my cash limit and an allowance of 100 items per month (far more than I needed).
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