My Competition Becomes My Accomplice
I discovered eBay on March 9, 1999 when the selling platform was in its early days. Scale collecting was already in my blood so it seemed like a good place to pick up some bargains. There were many hours spent searching and browsing, looking for that scale that was not part of my collection yet. Back in those days, there were usually multiple bidders for everything that was of interest to me. My routine was to check out the other bidders by looking at the items they had been bidding on. It was a good way to figure out who my competition might be on a particular scale. It was also important to check out how they bid; did they bid early or did they try to come in at the last minute, which is called sniping. I will confess, sniping was part of my strategy in those days. It did not always work as there could be a number of people all trying to do the same thing. So, this one scale comes up for auction; a grain tester also called a chondrometer. I had only seen a few come up for auction in the past and this one looked pretty special. The bidding was very lively but I chose to wait until the last possible moment and YES! I won the bid. It was only a few minutes later that a message came in from another eBayer that had been bidding on this same scale. I found out later his name was Stuart. He was furious with me because this was the second time that I had swooped in at the last minute and won a scale that he had been bidding on. I replied back that with a sincere apology. As a fellow collector, the same thing had happened to me on many occasions. We ended up communicating on a very regular basis. We agreed that we would not bid against each other. We actually became fast friends however I never had the opportunity to meet him face to face. One day Stuart contacted me about an extensive scale collection that was for sale in Europe. He asked me if I was interested in going in on the deal with him. After seeing photos of the collection, there was no doubt in my mind. We were on track to complete the deal but Stuart had to drop out due to some health issues. I decided to go ahead and complete the deal on my own and ended up buying a collection of 140+ scales, the deal of a lifetime! And to think it would have never happened without Stuart, my competition who became my friend.
