Part 3 - Not everyone on Ebay is a shark

In which we meet a nice guy and the project gets off to a flying start

It just goes to show that it you treat people fairly nice stuff can happen.  I spent hours hunting round Ebay for graphics tablets.  I’m not looking for anything in particular or restricting myself to anything of any particular size, I’m just looking to see what is there and to check out the prices.   I see cheaper tablets but 17” and 19”.   The problem is A3 Wacoms are coming in around £120 (which contradicts the challenge) so I start looking for misspellings and tablets hiding in odd places, searching listings as well as titles.

Bingo. A guy is selling a Mac G3 with a Wacom.   G3s go for £60-£90, but this has had a lot spent on it and it has a “buy it now” price of £100.  The listing doesn’t have a gallery photo and doesn’t explain about all the extras in the heading so I figure the high price will put people off.  So I plan to buy the lot and sell the Mac on to offset the cost.   I stick on a low bid (there is no reserve set) and win for £30! a quarter the price of a tablet on it’s own.

Now that’s cheap enough that I’d be more than happy to pay that just for the tablet, and shipping the Mac in and out starts to look like hassle, so I e-mail the seller and explain that I’m only after the tablet, ask if he’d sell me that at that price, he can relist the Mac and recoup some of his outlay I get a cheap tablet, everybody happy.   He e-mails back, It seems he’d not put the reserve on by accident assuming that a buy-it-now listing would automatically do it, and had been horrified at the price his kit had achieved.

He was so pleased that I’d been fair minded over the outcome that he insisted on sending me the tablet for nothing, and even insisted on paying the postage after being delayed sending it. So I’m now the very happy owner of a 12” x 12” Wacom ultrapad, and the project is go.

Price so far - £6.33 for the serial to USB adaptor.