We recently rejoined eBay. I originally cut my teeth in online trading there, back in the days when it felt more like the Wild West and less like a corporate bureaucracy armed with an algorithm. Over time, though, I became increasingly ground down, not by selling itself, but by eBay’s endless, baffling regulations and their tendency to penalize sellers for basically doing nothing wrong. Also, let’s be honest: some of the customers were unbearable. Not all of them, of course, most were fine, but compared to the lovely, mostly reasonable people on Etsy and Vinterior, eBay had its fair share of, shall we say, characters.
This time around, I took a different approach. I’m only selling higher end furniture, which has worked brilliantly. The buyers tend to be sensible, grown up people who just want a nice piece of furniture—simple, straightforward, no nonsense. For a while, it was almost enjoyable. Almost.
Then last week, the eBay curse struck again.
It wasn’t anything dramatic, just the usual low level stupidity that reminds you why you left in the first place. It’s not the odd difficult sale that’s frustrating, it’s the sheer amount of time, effort, and brainpower wasted dealing with pointless nonsense. You expect to invest effort into a sale, but you don’t expect to spend twice as much effort dealing with an idiot. So, I’ve learned to ignore the keyboard nonsense warrior.
Enter the Keyboard Expert
The item in question? A collectible set of Paol Hundevad 1970s coffee tables. A lovely set, genuinely high quality, and one of the best examples I’ve seen.
Enter a self-appointed eBay expert, who slid into my messages one day to inform me that, actually, these were not original Paol Hundevad tables at all. No, they were inferior copies, the kind of tat that used to be sold in Argos.
Now, I enjoy a good bit of vintage retail trivia as much as the next person, and yes, Argos did open in 1972, so technically, there could be a glimmer of truth in the idea that someone, somewhere, was churning out knockoffs. But the tables I was selling? They were the real deal. I’ve sold dozens of these over the years, I know them inside out, and this particular set was one of the best I’d ever seen.
But hey, people talk nonsense on the internet all the time, right? So, I did what any sane person would do in this situation: ignored it.
But He Came Back…
A few days later, he messaged again, angrily pointing out that I hadn’t changed the description or the price.
At this point, I couldn’t resist. I politely replied, asking him to provide evidence that these were Argos knockoffs. If he had something concrete—an old catalogue, an ad, literally anything, I’d be happy to reconsider and update the listing accordingly.
Of course, that was the last I ever heard from him.
The Psychology of a Pedantic Nitpicker
Now, what truly fascinates me about people like this is why?
Why would anyone sit behind a laptop, lecturing a stranger about an imaginary mistake that never actually happened? Why invest time and energy into correcting someone when you have no proof you’re right?
I can only conclude that this is a very specific personality type, one that thrives on:
- A desperate need to be right – Even when they’re not. Especially when they’re not.
- An innate inability to let things go – Because admitting they might have been wrong would mean facing their own fallibility, and we can’t have that, can we?
- A weird sense of superiority – This person genuinely believed they were performing some kind of public service by “correcting” me. They probably sat back, smugly satisfied, imagining me frantically rewriting my listing in a panic.
- The joy of anonymous interference – If you told a stranger in real life that their coffee table was from Argos in 1972, they’d tell you to get lost. But online? No consequences! Just fire off a smug message and wait for validation.
- Nothing better to do. You can imagine his spread sheets of ‘clients’ on his wall whom he lectures his misinformation to, a guru of ignorance.
In short, these people exist in a strange limbo between pompous know it all and hobbyist internet troll. They are the Flat Earthers of eBay, marching around the marketplace of ideas with all the confidence of an Oxford professor and none of the actual expertise.
And this, dear readers, is why eBay will always be eBay.
The Rights of Fans. 