The grumpy thread

[morris_ital_lover]

Ebay....

 

Sold an item a while ago which I promptly posted, only for it to go missing. Buyer informs me that he has had four items lost in the past year, somethings wrong here but hey-ho. He contacts me I tell him I can't do shite until royal mail will let me go and barter with them, leading to a bit of a waiting game. Whilst this is occurring I go away he contacts me, can't get through as I have no internet, and opens a case..... now he will not reply and my paypal is fucked as I have to give him a full refund if I want it to work despite the fact that he won't reply to anything I send to him and he needs to do a couple of tasks in order to get his money back.

 

rant over.

 

m0rris

[Guest]

Ebay....

 

Sold an item a while ago which I promptly posted, only for it to go missing. Buyer informs me that he has had four items lost in the past year, somethings wrong here but hey-ho. He contacts me I tell him I can't do shite until royal mail will let me go and barter with them, leading to a bit of a waiting game. Whilst this is occurring I go away he contacts me, can't get through as I have no internet, and opens a case..... now he will not reply and my paypal is fucked as I have to give him a full refund if I want it to work despite the fact that he won't reply to anything I send to him and he needs to do a couple of tasks in order to get his money back.

 

rant over.

 

m0rris

 

Ahhh fuck, this makes me feel so much better about sending your Tamiya 850 over via Royal Fail. If I get a moment today I'll get it packed up for you.

[morris_ital_lover]

Don't worry Wat, I was going to message you about that... I'm not going to be there for about a week so you can have a weeks rest if you want it

 

This actually the first problem I have had with Royal Fail for a long time, not exactly helped by an unhelpful buyer though.

 

m0rris

[maxpower]

Ebay....

 

Sold an item a while ago which I promptly posted, only for it to go missing. Buyer informs me that he has had four items lost in the past year, somethings wrong here but hey-ho. He contacts me I tell him I can't do shite until royal mail will let me go and barter with them, leading to a bit of a waiting game. Whilst this is occurring I go away he contacts me, can't get through as I have no internet, and opens a case..... now he will not reply and my paypal is fucked as I have to give him a full refund if I want it to work despite the fact that he won't reply to anything I send to him and he needs to do a couple of tasks in order to get his money back.

 

rant over.

 

m0rris

you may consider having to open a new account.....

 

i had to refund a twat that had taken(parts) what he needed from the iphone i sold him and then had the nerve 14 days later to say item wasnt as described???

ebay in their infinate wisdom award him the case (baffling i know) and refund him before i have got the phone back!!

minus the innards and the iphone box i sent it in... but that makes no difference because ebay still want ME to pay them £174

anyway after explaining the above to the 1000000000000th thick cnut that has answered the phone in ebayland i am still no nearer resolving this... except to say ebay has closed my account and i get a nice daily call from a company called iqor who are under the illusion that i am gonna hand them over £174 to give to ebay

no matter how many times you say feck off i aint paying the wont give up

 

"WELL EBAY I HAVE ANOTHER ACCOUNT AND YOUR STILL NOT GETTING PAID!

[morris_ital_lover]

Thats what I am worried about, luckily the item sold for just below £40, but I still don't want ebay fecking me over. I suspect that this person received item and realised that it was worth about £15-20 but that his bidding war avec another ebayer meant he'd paid a small fortune for not alot and consequently decided to say that it was lost in post.

 

The other problem is if he has put the wrong address up and has lost all of his stuff because some other person is sitting there with a confused expression on their face and a large number of parcels.

 

m0rris

[Station]

except to say ebay has closed my account and i get a nice daily call from a company called iqor who are under the illusion that i am gonna hand them over £174 to give to ebay

no matter how many times you say feck off i aint paying the wont give up

 

"WELL EBAY I HAVE ANOTHER ACCOUNT AND YOUR STILL NOT GETTING PAID!

 

I had IQOR on my back for a £5 charge for selling using paypal. £5 which was duly paid through paypal to paypal a couple of weeks earlier!

 

I don't really think they can do that to you seeing as it's unresolved in your eyes. R-soles.

[maxpower]

except to say ebay has closed my account and i get a nice daily call from a company called iqor who are under the illusion that i am gonna hand them over £174 to give to ebay

no matter how many times you say feck off i aint paying the wont give up

 

"WELL EBAY I HAVE ANOTHER ACCOUNT AND YOUR STILL NOT GETTING PAID!

 

I had IQOR on my back for a £5 charge for selling using paypal. £5 which was duly paid through paypal to paypal a couple of weeks earlier!

 

I don't really think they can do that to you seeing as it's unresolved in your eyes. R-soles.

 

well ebay did say i would get an email from them in 72 hours.............. that was in december 2010 still waiting

[Guest]

except to say ebay has closed my account and i get a nice daily call from a company called iqor who are under the illusion that i am gonna hand them over £174 to give to ebay

no matter how many times you say feck off i aint paying the wont give up

 

"WELL EBAY I HAVE ANOTHER ACCOUNT AND YOUR STILL NOT GETTING PAID!

 

I had IQOR on my back for a £5 charge for selling using paypal. £5 which was duly paid through paypal to paypal a couple of weeks earlier!

 

I don't really think they can do that to you seeing as it's unresolved in your eyes. R-soles.

 

well ebay did say i would get an email from them in 72 hours.............. that was in december 2010 still waiting

 

Alternate universe maybe. Or on Neptune.

 

No - no! Wait. Uranus. That's definitely where eBay customer services operate from, and talk out of. Some serious time dilation going on there too.

[wuvvum]

iQor are about the biggest bunch of tossers in the business. I just ignore them completely.

[Luxobarges_Are_Us]

do you HAVE to accept paypal for ebay transactions? can't you just specify cash or, even better, moneybookers (I guess ebay must love'em bookers!)?

[eddyramrod]

 

Nuff said?

 

I parked the truck around the corner while I was at my friend's garage this afternoon. When I came back to it, it looked like this ^^ which, needless to say, it didn't before. More fucking expense I don't need.

 

Also, went after a job photographing cars for a local Brit-run car auction. Turns out you have to go out and find the cars yourself, then sell the idea of auctioning them to the (most likely Cypriot) owners. And it's all done on a self-employed commission basis. Yeah right. If I was a natural salesman I could have been doing that for the last 30 years in UK instead of slogging up and down the motorways at 56 mph all day and night. And self-employed? In Cyprus?????????? Cypriots won't pay an up-front entry fee with no guarantee of a sale, especially when the sale they do get is likely to be below what they think the car is worth (which is about 25 times what it's actually worth). Oh what larks...

[trigger]

You should be able to pop the worse of that out yourself Eddie, Just take the door trim off and give it a thump with your palm.

[Luxobarges_Are_Us]

Also, went after a job photographing cars for a local Brit-run car auction. Turns out you have to go out and find the cars yourself, then sell the idea of auctioning them to the (most likely Cypriot) owners.

 

Serious (if a bit off-topic) question: do most Cypriots speak good English?

Their Greek is perfectly comprehensible to us lot (Greeks), but it certainly does sound a bit strange.

[eddyramrod]

Oh yes Trigger, it's just annoying. No note of apology, of course, nor even of witness.

 

Luxo, yes, most Cypriots do at least understand English, but you take a chance on whether they will choose to speak it; many won't. (It's like living in North Wales... ) I'm picking up a few words of (Cypriot) Greek, but not enough yet to make a sentence, much less a conversation, and you can bet never a sales pitch if I live to be 400! If it sounds strange to you, it's probably the difference between, let's say, New York English and Newcastle English for us.

[Luxobarges_Are_Us]

well, I'm a native Greek speaker, and I don't think I'd ever be able to make a sales pitch in the Cypriot dialect!

[eddyramrod]

You'd be way ahead of me though! At least you can start in the right language. To their credit, most of the Cypriots I speak to regularly can and do get by in English, even if the listener has to apply a little creative logic sometimes.

[Guest]

I did a starter course in Hellenic \ Greek, and I found it rather difficult. When learning a foreign language, you're at an even greater disadvantage if the written form uses a character set different from your own. Written Greek looks amazing, but I haven't the first clue what's going on.

 

Anyway, on to the inevitable grump. Other than Chrome being horrible and double posting unintentionally, of course.

 

OK, here's the thing. I want a Citroen GS. I've wanted one since I read CAR Magazine's 'Where's The Progress' article in July 1991. At this point we hit a problem. GSs were rare then, let alone now. The ones that do appear on eBay are watched by a small group who bid them to the sky and more often than not break them for parts. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it does smack of an insular mentality that doesn't want others involved in their game. I actually went and viewed the last GS Pallas that appeared on eBay in September. I could have taken it away for £350 (the owner was prepared to end the auction), but the fact a wheel bearing was on its way out, (a bad omen in itself given my track record), and almost every panel was peppered with rust didn't help things. It had a short MOT and the hydropneumatics creaked into position like a torpedoed ship listing in the breeze. That, and the fact I had no confirmed funding for University at the time made me come over all sensible and sell the Celeste instead. At least that car isn't getting split.

 

So that car fell by the wayside. Another car, this time a GSA, appeared on the listings here. It wasn't without problems but seemed a better prospect than the Pallas (although its the earlier cars I prefer - the GSA actually had a hatchback tailgate, for God's sake). Predictably, a bidding frenzy in the last 30 seconds put the car way out of my reach.

 

Now, I don't whether my want for a GS being denied has made me incredibly bad tempered towards the seller below, or whether he's just a bit of a flange. He's selling the car below without an engine (because he wants it for his light aircraft) and minus random important parts like the indicator stalk, headlamps and driver's door mirror. He wants first refusal if you ever come to sell it, and if you want to pick it up you have to pay the rent on his garage until you can make the appropriate arrangements. It strikes me as someone who wants to cherry pick the best bits off the car and then sell whatever's left for top dollar. Why he can't buy a recon engine from Chevronics and sell the car on complete is beyond me. He'd make a damn sight more money and it would be a lot less hassle for a potential buyer to take a complete running car away. He'd see between £650 - 800 for the car as it is. Or he could search the length and breadth of the country for someone who wants an engineless GS Break with no headlamps and key pieces of interior trim missing.

 

The fact that it's 290 miles away makes it a difficult prospect. Compound that with the fact that the vendor is a twerp and this ends up as yet another GS I can't give a home to.

 

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Citroen-GS-Estate-Shell-/140539501226?_trksid=p5197.m7&_trkparms=algo%3DLVI%26itu%3DUCI%26otn%3D4%26po%3DLVI%26ps%3D63%26clkid%3D8771652172991183403#ht_2878wt_1139

 

The other night though, I had a bit of a brainwave. I was searching Leboncoin for 604 spares for Pete - M and decided to have a look for GSs whilst I was at it. Unsurprisingly, they're far more plentiful in their country of origin, and your money seems to go a lot further. I can't see things changing here, and LHD really doesn't bother me. I might as well take an extended holiday to France, pick up a GS whilst I'm there, fill the boot with cheap plonk and drive home.

 

A mate has a nice villa in Normandy too. All of this has the makings of a seriously interesting summer holiday. Thoughts?

[Luxobarges_Are_Us]

yeah, going to France would be the most sensible idea. In fact, I may well get a car from there because LPG is reasonably popular there, and 605s/25s seem to hold their value a bit better than here so they're much better value as a slightly more expensive purchase means a car in GR9 condition supplied with a massive stack of bills (that's assuming I don't go mad and buy a nice* Tagora diseasel).

 

As for Greek, the alphabet surely can't be THAT hard. It's only 24 letters, of which about 15 are the same as the Latin ones. I guess the grammar 'd be much harder...I can read Russian alright (they have some letters common with Greek, but a lot of their own stuff, too), but don't have a clue what it all means...

[Jon]

Being so far away from Europe now makes me wish I'd been a bit more adventurous when I had been there and gone to see a bit more of it. The best way to do so would have been by car/van etc. and the most interesting way would have been to buy one on the continent, so I say (funds allowing) do it, especially if you could sell it on for spares over here quite easily if all goes wrong. Plus, on a more selfish note I'm sure it'd make a good read on here, so for the sake of those who would enjoy their cup of tea that bit more due to reading about your adventures, get it done!

[garethj]

wat, buying a GS from France looks like it's worth a try, be aware their standards of MoT aren't like ours so bits of fibreglass on the sills are allowed.

 

I've done the car from another country thing and it's.... character building. But I'd do it again.

[Rod/b]

It's my considered opinion that the seller of that GS is a MASSIVE BELLEND, if only for the "condition of sale" rubbish that he's trying to impose.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

That GS seller is a right fanny. 'I AM A PILOT DONT YOU KNOW, AND I KNOW ALL ABOUT CITROENS'. He's loving telling everyone how he's going to break up his 2-owner GS for a hare-brained project to be thought about at some non-specific time in the future. I wonder if he has the faintest idea how he will convert the cylinder heads to twin-plug ignition and get it past the certification people before he can fly it. 'I WILL BE SELLING THE SHELL WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS' well thats fuggin handy isnt it, what are you keeping the headlights for, are they going on your plane as well?

 

I would suggest avoiding him altogether and looking across the channel.

[Guest]

It's my considered opinion that the seller of that GS is a MASSIVE BELLEND, if only for the "condition of sale" rubbish that he's trying to impose.

 

Oh, good. I thought it was just me being tetchy. That bit really got me too. If you're getting withdrawal symptoms at the prospect of letting it go:

 

1. Don't sell it.

2. It's not your car any more, so what you think has no bearing on what happens to it subsequently.

 

Ironically, there's another rare car that I'm after that I can have for nowt on the condition of first refusal if I want to let it go. Then again, I know the seller really well, he's gone out of his way to help me in the past.......and he's not a crank in any way, shape or form.

 

Is this what happens though? Does having a rare car that's off the radar automatically mean it ends up in the hands of a ringpiece?

[Guest]

That GS seller is a right fanny. 'I AM A PILOT DONT YOU KNOW, AND I KNOW ALL ABOUT CITROENS'. He's loving telling everyone how he's going to break up his 2-owner GS for a hare-brained project to be thought about at some non-specific time in the future. I wonder if he has the faintest idea how he will convert the cylinder heads to twin-plug ignition and get it past the certification people before he can fly it. 'I WILL BE SELLING THE SHELL WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS' well thats fuggin handy isnt it, what are you keeping the headlights for, are they going on your plane as well?

 

I would suggest avoiding him altogether and looking across the channel.

 

Yeah, that had occurred to me as well Bol. He seems to have completely overlooked the fact that if he sold it complete, he'd be beating people off with a shitty stick. Who the hell is going to want a GS without an engine, headlights and random pieces of unobtanium trim (other than a very small group of enthusiasts)? Who makes drive units to mate a car engine to a prop anyway? An engine with fifty odd brake would be shit in a plane, wouldn't it?

[Mr_Bo11ox]

Beetle engines and Subaru engines sometimes get used in planes, both with twin-plug cylinder head conversions that have been approved by the civil aviation people having clocked up a certain number of hours on test beds and then in the air. I agree that a 1200cc engine is not going to be much cop (I think the beetle engines used are invariably 1600/1700 jobs) even if he did miraculously create some twin plug heads for it in his garden shed. Might be OK for a single seater effort made out of binbags and drinking straws I suppose.

[Guest]

Beetle engines and Subaru engines sometimes get used in planes, both with twin-plug cylinder head conversions that have been approved by the civil aviation people having clocked up a certain number of hours on test beds and then in the air. I agree that a 1200cc engine is not going to be much cop (I think the beetle engines used are invariably 1600/1700 jobs) even if he did miraculously create some twin plug heads for it in his garden shed. Might be OK for a single seater effort made out of binbags and drinking straws I suppose.

 

So to summarise, the seller is a blert?

[revolting peasant]

[Mr_Bo11ox]

Hey wat!!! Heres the same GS being sold as a going concern.

 

http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C204978

 

Only £3800! I have been in touch with the seller and he's on about breaking it up as he's 'had it for sale for 5 years with no interest whatsoever', can't think of any possible reason why that might be.

[TimothyClaypole]

Beetle engines and Subaru engines sometimes get used in planes, both with twin-plug cylinder head conversions that have been approved by the civil aviation people having clocked up a certain number of hours on test beds and then in the air. I agree that a 1200cc engine is not going to be much cop (I think the beetle engines used are invariably 1600/1700 jobs) even if he did miraculously create some twin plug heads for it in his garden shed. Might be OK for a single seater effort made out of binbags and drinking straws I suppose.

 

So to summarise, the seller is a blert?

 

No he's a grade A wanker.

 

It reads like a ransom note.

 

You might get them back but minus fingers, then again they might have no head etc.

[Guest]

Hey wat!!! Heres the same GS being sold as a going concern.

 

http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C204978

 

Only £3800! I have been in touch with the seller and he's on about breaking it up as he's 'had it for sale for 5 years with no interest whatsoever', can't think of any possible reason why that might be.

 

Because he thinks it's worth too much?