WHAT DAY IS IT?

The days are beginning to blur together. The calendar gives me a vague reminder that time is indeed marching on. It’s nearly July now. I used to think that waking up, commuting to work, spending all day at the studio, coming home, eating dinner, and relaxing in the evening was a bit monotonous but it now seems like I’ve been working from home for over a year now.

Work gives me very little satisfaction. I know today was Monday but it could have been any day of the week. Last week I realized that even though we’re in the summer months, the weather is nice and sunny, I might have to wait until I see snow again before it’s appropriate to think about physically returning to work. There is continued talk about not returning to work until January of 2021 and even then, it might be an optional return.

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking many of my days are the same. I know, however, many more people have it worse than I, so I don’t have much to complain about. I wonder what life will look like in January.

PAID

I decided to message the person on eBay who bid and won the latest item I put on auction. I wrote a very polite message in which I said that if he was still interested in the item, he could pay at his earliest convenience. By the time I woke up on Sunday morning, he had wrote an apologetic message and more importantly, he had paid me.

I wrote him back, thanked for the payment, and told him I’d ship his item on Monday. I then packed the item, wrapped it, paid for shipping online, printed the shipping label, and affixed it to the package. While shipping my first sold item was a bit of a nightmare, this time it went very smoothly. This time, the integration with Canada Post worked correctly. Buying shipping and printing the label was pretty much seamless. I’ll drop off the package at the post office tomorrow.

I have more item I’d like to try selling on eBay, which is a DSL modem that I no longer need because I have Internet over fibre now. I have no idea how popular DSL modems are. I tried searching on eBay for the model I’m trying to sell. I didn’t find any listings. That’s probably either really good or really bad. Well, it won’t cost me anything to put up a listing, so I might as well try.

LONG WEEKEND

I decided to take Friday off and make it a long weekend. I currently have 27 days of vacation accrued, which is over five weeks. I have no trips planned this summer, so I have days off to spare. My employer, as a whole, is encouraging all employees to take time off this summer, even if we can’t go anywhere, just so we can get a break from work. That’s great advice and I’ll take it.

UNPAID

The person on eBay who bid on and won the auction for the optical drive has not yet paid for the item. The auction ended on Tuesday and it’s now Thursday. I’m playing it cool and letting eBay’s automated messages remind the buyer that he now needs to pay up.

I never really thought about what happens when someone doesn’t pay on eBay. I’ve always paid for my items in a timely fashion. The first item I sold last week was paid immediately.

It turns out you can’t really force someone to pay you on an eBay auction. eBay will mark a strike against this person’s account. If you get too many strikes, then you can’t bid on items for a while. Sellers can also prevent accounts that have too many strikes from making bids on their items as well. If I have to re-list my item, eBay will refund you any fees you paid to make the listing. My listing was free, so other than the inconvenience, I didn’t lose out. This would have been a lot easier had there been multiple bids on my item as I would have just offered it to the person with the next highest bid. Unfortunately, only one person bid on my item.

I will give the person a few more days to pay me. If by Sunday, nothing has happened, I will send my own message to them. If I get no traction after that, I can begin the eBay process of resolving this, which puts a strike against the “buyer” and allows me to re-list the item.

WEEKEND PLANS

A few weeks ago, I was driving past a McDonald’s and I saw a sign that mentioned they made chicken McMuffins now. That sounds amazing. I didn’t have time to stop and go get one but I’ve made it one of my weekend goals. I’m trying to keep my life simple and delicious at the same time. I hear they have mayo in the chicken McMuffin. I bet it tastes so good.

ANOTHER SOLD

By the time I wake up tomorrow morning I will have sold another item on eBay, this time an optical disc drive. Obviously I enjoy getting rid of stuff I don’t want or need and getting money for it but I’ve quickly discovered that dealing with the post office and everything that goes with shipping is a huge headache. At least for me, it’s that way.

What I don’t understand is how you can get wildly differing quotes on how much it costs to ship something depending if you query it on the Canada Post web site or if you go in-person to the post office. For the same service, you’ll get different prices for the same package. Like I mentioned in my previous post, eBay makes it’s difficult to print your mailing labels because it forces you to use shippo, a crappy web site.

I’ll have to ship my item tomorrow but I don’t look forward to it.

SOLD

I sold and shipped my first ever item on eBay on the weekend. I sold some “old” 16GB DDR4 computer memory that I wasn’t using anymore because I got new RAM that was faster. Rather than just let it sit unused, I decided to sell it. Computer components, even those used, are at a bit of a premium right now, due to the pandemic and smaller supply. Memory isn’t that bad right now but I knew it would probably be popular.

My item got enough bids that it sold at a much higher price than I anticipated. At that higher price, that meant my new memory only cost me $30, which is great. Selling old stuff to offset the cost of new stuff is a timeless way to save money. Shipping my sold item turned out to be a bit of a hassle. eBay makes you use this shipping service called shippo to print out your mailing labels. I had to sign up for an account and then it attempted to contact the Canada Post web site to sign me up for an account on there. Whatever tech they use to talk to each other failed, so I couldn’t get a Canada Post account, which prevented me from printing out a mailing label. It was so frustrating to not be able to print out a simple mailing label with my buyer’s address.

I finally gave up on it, went to the Canada Post web site directly, which wasn’t down, and manually typed in the mailing address info, and created a mailing label there. After that, I just dropped the item off at the post office.

I also have a second item on sale on eBay. This is the old optical disc drive I have. It only has one bid that means it’ll sell for sure. When that auction is over, I’ll have to repeat the same BS with the mailing label as before. Sometimes making money is a hassle.

AN EGG SANDWICH

Last week I watched the movie Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. In general, I think as DC movies go, it was not bad. It didn’t have any stupid moments like Batman vs. Superman did. They were really smart to not have to deal with the Joker in the movie as well.

The film also prominently featured an egg sandwich throughout the story. For a superhero movie of sorts, you rarely see food items so up front. YouTube star chef Andrew Rea recreates the sandwich in the above video. It does look pretty delicious.

VACATION DAYS

So my initial thought about vacation this summer is that it would be a waste of vacation days to take time off during a pandemic where you can’t go anywhere, other than possibly inside your own province. Even then, you still have to be careful. I tend to leave the country when I go on vacation or at least leave the province but that’s not a likely scenario this summer. So, I’m original plan was to just keep all my vacation days until all of this blows over.

My latest thinking, however, is that it would suck not to have any extra days off this summer. Working from home is still work and there are days where I just wish I could not do work and just chill out. A co-worker of mine took yesterday off to go on a hike and that seemed like such a great idea. At the very least, I think I’ll take an extra day off with each remaining long weekend for the summer. I’ll probably take an odd vacation day here and there as well.

EBAY UPDATE

In a previous post, I wrote about my desire to start selling items on eBay. I figure it would be a good way to get rid of some items around my apartment and to make some money back.

Since writing that post, I’ve now listed two items for sale: some computer memory and an optical disc drive for PCs. The memory has been more popular so far. It has four bids already and more than happy to get paid that amount, even if no more people bid. The memory is quite new, so it’s not unexpected that it would be more popular than the optical drive. The drive has been listed for about half a day and there hasn’t been any bids yet. It’s quite a bit older, with that particular model released in 2008. Now you’re probably wondering why I’m selling something that old, especially for computer components. Well, it’s a somewhat rare drive that reads both Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. If you don’t remember what HD-DVD discs are, I don’t blame you. About twelve years ago or so, there was a format war for who would be the successor to the DVD format. It was Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, with Blu-ray winning. HD-DVD players and compatible drives are somewhat of a novelty now, so I’m relying on that to find a buyer for it. I’ve seen the same drive listed for over $100 on eBay and I’ve priced it way lower than that. Someone please buy it!