Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Truth, justice and don't mess me around on ebay mister

We recorded two episodes of Annually Retentive last night - or at least the show within the show. I think everyone decided that we should do the show as well as we could rather than seeking to make a deliberately bad panel-show. The end result was a very enjoyable night with some remarkably good guests. The whole project feels much more real this morning and I'm really looking forward to the next couple of days.

Now... I have a few loose ends to tie up relating to my two recent ebay related fiascos.

The most recent of these concerned the attempts of a certain Jon Hogg to defraud people by selling them nothing but the belief that they were taking part in a TV show I was making. I wrote about it a couple of days ago and you can also read about it in this Chortle story here.

Now Jon Hogg turns out to be a 17 year old lad who in his father's words can be "a bit of a d*ckhead". (His Dad didn't say * he said i )

The truth of the matter is that Jon was doing something wrong and even after it was obvious that he'd been caught doing it he was prepared to carry on, ignoring e-mails from me and others on the subject. Sadly it was only the threat of serious consequences that persuaded him to put a stop to it. Still, at least he acted before ebay... their first response was to tell me that they couldn't remove the listing, which makes no sense at all. They've since removed it. Which makes sense. Odd.

The second ebay related series of events is certainly more trivial but has been running a little longer. I first mentioned it in this parish at the end of February. It concerned my attempts to purchase a DVD of the brilliant sit-com Peep Show which was in part prompted by the ridiculous news that Channel 4 had decided not to commission a new series (see Chortle.) Since then it seems that someone at Channel 4 has seen sense and a new series has been commissioned after all. (see Chortle again.)

But I digress. The point is that the seller concerned was actually trying to sell counterfeit copies of the first series. Ebay discovered this and ended their listing but I'd already paid for it. I requested a refund to no avail. The seller then disappeared from ebay and removed all the money from their paypal account. No refund came. No DVD arrived either.

Oddly just after I put their name and e-mail address on this page they got in touch to say they would sort it out. While I'm sure they will be true to their word I'm slightly confused by the e-mails I'm receiving from them which seem to be very insistent that it wasn't their fault. Now it's possible that she is telling the truth - in which case it is her brother who is responsible for this whole thing and she was on holiday at the time. Of course that would involve her brother having her passwords and registering a paypal account in her name and using her e-mail address but in a way that was to his financial advantage... which I have to say seems a tad unlikely. In any case if that is what happened I think she should probably be directing her anger at her brother.

I'm told that it should all be resolved today. I hope so.


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