The Sex and the City Curse

We're going to take a break from the car story today so I can get something off my chest.

As part of my ongoing efforts to be a good boyfriend, and because I love her I like to buy SouthernKitten little presents from time to time. This fall, I'd thought it would be nice to get her some Sex in the City DVDs.

I thought this would be fun. Whenever SouthernKitten travels or otherwise has access to HBO she invariably gets sucked into watching Sex and the City. Wouldn't it be great if she could watch it at home!?!

So, I set out to find the DVDs I was looking for on eBay. EBay has traditionally been a great place to find all sorts of different items for me. Surely they would have these DVDs! SouthernKitten was going to be so pleased!

When I searched eBay for "Sex and the City" the first thing I discovered was that a whole lot of the DVDs offered were being shipped from various parts of Asia. These ones tended to be ridiculously cheap with very high shipping costs. Some came in funny cases, some came without cases, most looked cheaply made and had Chinese subtitles. All in all it seemed very sketchy.

"I will be wise" I thought to myself. "I will avoid being ripped off by finding a vendor in the US or Canada".

This was a great theory.

The first DVDs I bid on were the first season. I was bidding reasonably early and expected to be outbid. But that was fine, I'd deal with that when it happened, this was more dipping my toe in the water than anything. Then I found the first THREE seasons going for only a little more. It was ending soon so I slipped my bid in under the wire and won that auction. I just wouldn't rebid on the first one and everything would be good.

Predictably, no one else bid on the first set, so I won that auction, too. This would mean I had two copies of the first season. Slightly annoying, but no big deal. I'd resell one of them, or give it away or something. All an excellent theory.

My first problem was that the seller of the three seasons didn't send me an email acknowledging payment or giving me an estimate as to when the DVDs would arrive. That's not altogether unusual in and of itself. I've purchased a lot of things on eBay and with some of them I just didn't hear from the vendor until the item arrived. When a couple of weeks passed and the DVDs had not turned up and I started getting concerned. So I emailed the seller. No response. I tried again. No response. After several emails went unanswered, I noticed that the seller had relisted MY DVDs!! I left negative feedback on eBay and a complaint on PayPal.

My negative feedback was read by another user who'd also been having problems with this vendor. She'd had more luck getting her to reply to emails, but the same complete lack of results in actually getting her item shipped. We shared our stories and she told me about how she would take the vendor to small claims court if her money was not refunded.

Around this time the vendor got in touch with me. Eventually she agreed to refund my money, and if she is true to her word will have put a money order in the mail by now.

I was a sad that SK would not be receiving three seasons like I'd hoped, but I figured that this would solve my duplicate problem... One season was still nice and a good start.

At least that's what I thought.

The vendor for the single season had started off very responsive. He'd sent emails advising me on the status of the DVDs and given me an estimate on their time of arrival. So I was very comfortable that all was going as planned. Then the arrival date came and went with no DVDs arriving. This wasn't good. I emailed the vendor and asked for an update. He apologized and advised me that there'd been some sort of mix up and that he'd thought the DVDs had already gone out. He promised that they'd be shipped right away. This seemed reasonable to me, so I waited another week, confident that SK would soon have the DVDs in her little hands.

No DVDs.

I sent another email. No response. And another. Still no response. A check of eBay showed that he was no longer a registered user. For all intents and purposes this vendor appears to have vanished from the face of the Earth and taken my money with him.

So, the long and the short of it is, God does not seem to want SK to have Sex and the City DVDs, and if I'm lucky I should get most of my money back.

I will not, however, be using the money to buy any more Sex and the City DVDs. Arguing with God is counter productive.