There was a time I thought this stuff was for eBay boards, but now I just call it transparency and post it here.
I was rushed today, had a lot on my mind, aspirations of doing more than I could accomplish. And a pretty good-sized stack of postal shipments to handle, including three oil lamps which can be quite labor intensive when it comes to packing.
I’ve been running two IDs at eBay and both IDs had sales, so I needed to “administrate” a little, making sure I had orders printed out for each. That’s where things started to unravel. The newer ID has been offering airline timetables from 1967-1969, a custom project, and that’s been pretty successful, generating some repeat orders from buyers and multiple purchases from buyers to combine for shipping.
I got some of that flipped around and wound up convincing myself I needed to include a third timetable in a package of two when that wasn’t the case, shooting out into the wilderness twenty dollars worth of Thing that wasn’t mine in the first place. That’s one of those first rules of survival: don’t do that.
I’ve contacted both those buyers of course, and have no reason to believe we can’t straighten it out without anybody getting mad, and I’ve done the same thing before once. In over eleven thousand transactions. I really try not to. So I beat myself up. Oh no, I should probably refund the guy I’ve shorted, at least until I know I can fix it, but I just spent all the money on the day’s postage and my monthly payment to my ISP and that isn’t going to work too well. I manage to drop everything I’m doing while I fret.
In the meantime, downstairs is a very nice Cross Classic Black ball pen I stumbled upon at Goodwill. I don’t source at Goodwill, but I do buy candles there (yes, I spend money on stuff to light on fire). I glanced in a case standing in line at the checkout and there it was: a Cross box.
My brother bought me a Cross pen for my high school graduation. It was a silver one, with a gnurled (sp?) grip that was later discontinued, and when I sent it in for repair at one time they sent back the “carcass” because it was discontinued with a new pen as its replacement. He had popped for having my name engraved on it, and I was just impressed to death by the entire act.
So, I’ve collected and used Cross pens ever since the early 70s, rarely go anywhere without one clipped to me (present “traveling” model is a gold one with Firestone engraving), and keep one at my computer (silver), and one at my packing bench (classic black) and one upstairs in the loft with my tax junk (another gold one I think), and then I have a standard brass pencil holder with the rest of them: a rollerball pen, several pencils, a couple of other stand-by pens……
The Cross Classic Black is worth about twenty bucks if you hold your mouth right, as my dad used to say, or sometimes it’s worth five bucks when people price them like that and they go overlooked (it’s quite possible to day-trade Cross’s at eBay and I have).
So I think I’ll have another mini-drama: should I keep it because it’s one of my favorite styles or should I sell it because I never seem to stop needing twenty bucks?
Shouldn’t those two mini-dramas cancel each other out?
