Orcs at eBay

My brother has a penchant for collectibles and during one of his expeditions in the internet, he found this item up for an auction at ebay and with lesser hobby shops existing in this part of the country, my brother wanted to try his luck in ebay. Here’s how it works, somebody puts up an item for an auction at ebay, bidding will last for a week, and bidders place their prices online. My brother registered himself and used this useless orc character in some board game to be his avatar, he then placed his bid for that item on just the second bidding day. Nobody bothered to outbid him and he was confident he’ll win. But then suddenly on the seventh day during the last few hours of bidding when suddenly hordes of other bidders came and threw prices til the item was fivefold than what my brother bidded.

Finding this challenged posed by ebay, my brother started another bidding campaign on another item he fancied, and this time he threw his bid the same way other crafty bidders did, on the last hour of the auction which for that item, ended at midnight, raising his bid each time by two dollars. I was probably drunk at that hour so I wasn’t checking on his progress, only that he roused me the next morning that he just won his first auction.

He got his package and now hooked to online bidding, he surfed for more items to buy. There was this item, but a worthless item, on auction and the starting bid was peanuts anyway. The item was up at its first day of bidding so my brother placed a bid about a couple of cents higher, he was confident that some other sucker will soon outbid him, and he never wanted that item anyway. In short he was just bidding for the sake of it.

It was a trash item indeed and two days ago to my brothers horror, nobody outbid him and he won the auction. He was screaming, but I told him the trash he bought was pretty much worth the little scrap money he bidded.

He said

“Scrap money or not, but I’m still paying a whole lot of dough for the parcel so that they can send me the junk I bought!”

Class Dismissed

There’s this jesuit school in our city that to my amazement, offered me a teaching position in their school. The headmaster wanted to meet me that I got several calls from the priest the week before, it is a religious school and their headmaster is a man of god, and a very learned man of god, I’ve heard he had his tour of duty for priesthood in rome and he could talk every other language in this planet.

Anyway I met up with him last sunday, I could have met up with him saturday but I just had 15 beers that friday and there might still be remnants of alcohol in my brain that I might not still be thinking right and make drastic decisions. The priest started the conversation with this pick up line “I’ve heard so much about you” which I knew were true, he should have known I’m a man of liquor. The offer was this: I was to teach mandarin to sophomore high. He explained to me that he’s after young blood people to teach rather than the old professionals albeit the wisdom and yak yak yak I was staring at the wooden cross he had on his neck for the rest of the conversation. I am impressed on how he humbly kept a trinket of his faith of lesser material value when he has already served his god in rome.

I swear my mandarin is poor but I could still talk pretty much conversational mandarin, and from the last time I checked a month ago, my mandarin can still get my ass into tiananmen square at 10 in the evening by asking directions in the streets. Them chinamen gibberish still made some sense to my ears including this red guard who yelled me off after I crossed some restricted government property. Goddam chinamen should have known that I came from a free country.

Finally I declined the offer, I have a lot of things to run in our business and I know I didn’t have the patience, and I have other concerns which in a way might put these kid’s education at stake, though everybody wanted me to take the job too but I know I shouldn't because I would be a very terrible example to the kids if you have read much of what I wrote in this blog.