EBAY SUCCESS REDEFINED.

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The following information has only been shared with a precious few of my most trusted associates and allies, but my basement dwelling within the McHanslaw manor has fallen victim to a flood for the third time in as many years, and as a result I've decided it's finally time to extricate myself from this rent-free near-windowless laminate forest and trade it in for some sort of lease-based "apartment" type dwelling that I (hopefully) won't share with two 60some year old roommates.

Of course, they'll probably go down as the best roommates I ever had, but that's sort of beside the point.

This impending move has warped my spend-thrifty ways into downright miserliness, so when I needed a new jigsaw for the purpose of creating an ornate headboard for a bed frame I'll be building sometime soon (more on that later... like, probably months from now later), I didn't go to Home Despot. Nay, I didn't even go to Amazon. I went to eBay.

Normally I don't take the cheap route on tools - be they electronic or not - as a tool is something I plan to have for a LONG time when I buy it, but I really didn't have the coin available to buy a Bosch machine, or my dream jigsaw from Milwaukee, so instead of getting some middle of the road "adequate but generally unspectacular" machine, I opted to get a bargain basement "wholly unspectacular but generally reliable" unit. In this price range, Black and Decker and Skil are the only brands I found worth looking into, so I tracked a few auctions and put in ridiculously lowball bids on them in the hopes that one of them might pan out.

Then one did. A Black and Decker. A brand new one. For a whopping $1.29 winning bid ($11.18 after shipping).

This was well below the normal closing price for identical saws, so I was somewhat befuddled as to what had gone on here, especially since the auction closed on a Sunday afternoon (word to the wise: If you want top dollar for crap you're selling on eBay, list it to close on Saturday or Sunday, the prices almost always get pumped up on the weekends). But then I took a second listing at the auction, and it all became clear to me. Well... the "why I got it for 11 bucks" part of it, anyway:

Let's go in for a closer look at that little guy, shall we?

"Oh, no wonder," I thought. "I won a jizsaw. That's not what I needed at all."

Oh well, I paid for the item anyway. Hopefully the item I eventually receive will turn out to be a normal jigsaw that just fell victim to a typo (albeit a typo that the auction author exercised TWICE in his listing), and failing that hopefully the item won't give me nightmares or VD.

Then again, there's a lot of guys out there that've paid a heck of a lot more for VD than $11 after shipping, so I guess I'll be coming out ahead either way.

There's no way to write that last sentence without loading it full of unintentional innuendo. You have my apologies.