eBay sucks

In recent weeks I made two significant purchases on eBay.  A trailer and a motherboard.  Let me give you a bit of a backstory.  As you may or may not know, I'm a linguist in the Air Force, and I got them to send me back to school for a year-long language course in California.  This means that instead of doing a job that I kind of hate for 10 hours a night, I will essentially get to go back to college in California for a year with almost no military responsibilities.  Awesome, right?

Armed with the knowledge that I'm currently in Georgia, you will agree that it is indeed relentlessly awesome

Anyway, I tend to procrastinate on most things, but anticipate excessively on things that get me excited.  This trip was one of those things.  I'd been wanting to learn a new language ever since I went through the langauge school the first time over 6 years ago.  Let me put it this way: when I found out I was getting the Farsi class, I popped a woody that could break a lesser man's spirit. 

The military is pretty awesome when it comes to taking care of you.  People often complain that the pay isn't very much, and soldiers in combat don't get paid "nearly enough for this shit," and all that is true, but I'm referring to the benefits.  Free medical care.  Housing and food allowance commensurate with your location.  Education paid for (if you do it right).  And a litany of other things.  Granted, there's a lot of bullshit you have to put up with, and there are horror stories about the medical care.

Tricare, the medical insurance company that the military uses, loves to prescribe Motrin for everything.  Vitamin M, we call it.  In fact, the doctors are so used to giving that shit out for everything, that I had a friend who went to the hospital with a broken leg, and who was in intense pain.  The doctor automatically gave him a bottle of the stuff, and then, after my friend gave him an "Are you fucking kidding me?" look, snapped out of his trance, scratched his head and mumbled "Oh yeah, you're probably going to need something a bit stronger, huh?" 

I imagine this is the look that crosses everyone's face when dealing with military doctors

I personally know 2 people who went to the hospital with acute abdominal pains.  Anyone with the least bit of medical training (and yes, episodes of "House" count) will recognize this as a possible case of appendicitis, which can be serious if left untreated. They were sent home with a bottle of Motrin, and intructions to come back in the morning if the pain got worse.  Essentially, they were told to "walk it off."  Of course, the pain did get worse.  One of them actually burst in the night, and had to be rushed to the hospital.  He almost died.  The joke about military healthcare is as follows:

Q: What do you call a med school graduate who got all A's in class?
A: Doctor
Q: What do you call a med school graduate who got all C's?
A: Captain.

For those who don't get it, his rank is Captain

But I digress.  Apart from some slip ups, the military treats their people very well. They want everyone fully fit for duty, be it physical fitness, mental fitness, social fitness or emotional fitness.  Basically, if there's anything bothering you, it can affect you ability to do your job, and they don't want that.  Financial distress is a big one, and for that reason, there is a housing allowance, which you get on top of your base pay.  If everyone got the same pay nationwide, people in some areas wouldn't be able to afford to live.  If you live in Tennessee, for example, a decent 2 bedroom apartment plus utilities may cost $700 a month.  Take that same apartment in Hawaii or California, and you're out $2000 a month.  At least.  The housing allowance reflects that.

Now you may be asking what the point of all this is.  I'm getting to it.  When you PCS (permanent change of station) to another base, the government pays to move you, your family, and your household to that new location.  Normally they'd buy you all plane tickets and pay a moving company to ship your stuff.  The government, being the government, tends to overspend, because it requires a certain level of uniformity and quality.  That's why you hear about them buying chairs for $400 a pop or spending millions to renovate a habitat for feral children.  You or I may be able to spend time looking for deals at Office Depot, Craigslist or Goodwill, and pick up the same chair for $20.  However, the government doesn't have the time or resources to troll yardsales, so it resorts to contracts, asking a number of companies which one of them can provide 5,000 chairs for the cheapest.  And they tend to overbid.

True story

 To save money on PCSing soldiers, the military offers its members the option of moving their stuff themselves, a do-it-yourself (DITY) move.  They pay you up to 95% of what it would cost them to hire a moving company.  You may see the benefit here.  Get a U-Haul, load your stuff, and drive out there, and you end up pocketing a few thousand dollars.  Everyone wins!

So back to me planning for stuff well in advance.  I started thinking about the move a few weeks ago (it wasn't for another 5 months), and decided I'd like to make some extra cash on my move across the country. I briefly considered a rental truck, but decided the gas cost would be astronomical, and could save a few hundred by putting my stuff in a trailer that I'd tow behind my car. 

My car

Obviously, this car wasn't designed with towing in mind.  However, where there's a will, there's a waiver, and there are aftermarket kits you can buy.  I got one from Auto Zone, and it was relatively simple to attach.  It just took me the better part of an hour because it's cramped under my car (my driveway isn't equipped with a lift), and I couldn't figure out how to hold up one side of the towing hitch while I bolted the other side to the car's frame.  I tried a stack of books, but after a half hour of no luck, I ended up using my car jack.

Shut up, Picard

My car can only tow 1500 lbs, including the driver, and every pound the trailer weighed would subtract from the stuff I could carry.  U-Haul offers trailers for rent but the lightest is 900 lbs. YEEEAH... not gonna happen.  I ended up going with a bare bones frame on wheels which weighs 250 lbs, and folds up so you can put it in your house.

The cheapest I could find it was on eBay for $450 including shipping.  It took a few weeks, and arrived in a 52' truck which could barely navigate the narrow roads of my neighborhood.  I immediately started putting it together.  The basic frame took about 6 hours over 2 days to assemble, mostly because I kept screwing up and putting stuff together upside down or backwards.  A few days later, I installed the axle, and a few days after that, I went for the wheels.  This is where the problem presented itself.  Something was wrong with one side of the axle, and wouldn't let the wheel hub on, even when I tried to coax it on with my foot.

Read: I kicked the crap out of it and it didn't go on.  Somebody will be getting a swift kick to the nuts instead

After my initial exasperation passed, I decided to call the company.  A 30 minute hold later, I was talking with a helpful but clueless man with a Spanish accent who said they had no record of a sale having been made to anyone with my last name.  Normally bullshit to me is like lactose to an Asian - it simply will not be tolerated - and I was up to my neck in it by this point, but I decided to share the trivial knowledge of the item's precedence with my phone captor.  It was then that a lightbulb came on, and the murky depths of bull receded.  Turns out that since I had bought it on eBay instead of directly from the company, they couldn't warranty it, and I was shit out of luck.  To add insult to injury, the company had a store in my city, not 10 miles away from my house.  So I could have saved myself $117 in shipping.

The second part of this cautionary tale involved my desktop computer.  Don't worry, there's no drawn-out explanation here.  It stopped working, and after troubleshooting it with a friend, we both decided that the motherboard was the bitch causing all my problems.  Most techies shudder at the thought of replacing the motherboard, because it's expensive and is a hassle.  They recommend you just get a new computer.  I didn't feel like doing that, as I had programs on there I didn't feel like re-installing, and I was attached to this one.  So I went to (you guessed it) eBay, and bought a refurbished $200 motherboard.  A week later, it was at my door, and after carefully installing it, I hooked it up to my screen, and excitedly pushed the "On" button...

Nothing happened.  There was no picture.  On top of that, both my mouse and keyboard had mysteriously stopped working.  Another friend of mine, who knows a thing or two about computers, came over 2 days later, to take a look.  He pored over it, testing everything.  Eventually he said "fuck it, it's not working, get a new one." 

He also took a look at the trailer axle, and asked where I had acquired it.  Upon hearing the verdict, he intoned: "And what have we learned today?"

I learned that eBay sucks.