£450 was my final offer, and it
had neither matched nor exceeded the reserve. The only circumstances under which the Pinarello could now be mine was if I
remained the highest bidder and that £450 was close enough to the seller’s
valuation that he/she might let it go for less. By now I'm not sure I even cared.
I
left my house at 18:41 and the auction was due to reach fruition at 22:10:11. I assumed this time-scale was dependent on
the exact moment the sale was floated and calculated on the basis of that – how
else can you explain those extra 11 seconds of opportunity?
When
I logged on to eBay the following morning I was quite relieved to see that I
had failed in my bid. But it was funny:
my final offer had been the second-to-last tender of the day, before some
opportunist came in with a bid of £460 at precisely 22:10:08. How’s that for taking it down to the
wire?
As far as I
could tell, at 22:10:04, the leading bid – my bid – was visible at £400. Somebody else then attempted to trump my bid
with an offer of £422. I’d set my
maximum bid at £450, so they were destined to fail, but this now placed me as
the highest bidder with an offer of £430, because eBay raises the bid (in
increments determined by the current value) on your behalf. Waiting in the wings, the eventual winner then
submitted an offer of £460. I can only
wonder what would have happened if, with the bidding set at £430 with just 3
seconds to run, the bidder had decided to chance his arm on a maximum offer of,
say, £440. At least I think that's how it
works...
But they still
hadn't made the reserve. Had they taken
a chance on my bid being close? Were
they confident that the seller would acquiesce to the sellee and take whatever
they could get? Was I missing something
concerning the nature of eBay? Was this
a green light for the winning bidder to now enter into a personal dialogue with
salesperson whereupon they’d thrash it out between them, reaching some sort of
fiscal compromise? Consumed by intrigue,
I sent the following email to the seller:
'Hey - are you
selling your Pinarello for less than the reserve? I see that I was outbid at
the last minute. If I'd known what the reserve was I might have bid higher in
the first place. I don't really
understand why people keep their reserve price secret - it just encouraged me
to pull out of the bidding early. Anyway, if you let me know what you are prepared to take then I might
still be interested.
Also, why did you
buy a new saddle if you intended to sell the bike? I think you priced a lot of
people out of the auction by having to cover that cost in your reserve.'
I wasn't expecting a reply to
this and nor did I get one – which is a shame. It is a shame if only because it would make for more interesting
reading, especially if the seller had somehow taken offence and sent me some sort of invective
in return.(I never intend on being provocative or insidious, and it genuinely surprises me how irascible some folk can be when questioned via the medium of email. This rarely happens vis-à-vis, after all;
people tend to take you at face value. There’s something about the email that seems to fool people into
attributing a more cynical tone to the text. Maybe that says more about them than it does
me. Or have I missed some sort of social
convention here?) Anyway, the Pinarello
was gone, the Raleigh had been long shipped and presumably received (to a
disconcerting silence on the receiver’s part) and I was finally at liberty to
buy that lovely looking Carlos.
And so I did. On Friday I climbed aboard the train to
Waterloo, changed onto the Northern Line, vacated at Highgate and walked back
down Archway Road. I felt strangely anxious
as I neared the Vintage Bike Cave, so much so that I sought refuge in a delicatessen on
the opposing side of the road, for a coffee to settle my nerves. This can be explained in part by a job vacancy
at the Vintage Bike Cave that I had expressed a vague interest in. It seemed like it might be a nice place to
work, I was unemployed, and working with bikes has to be kind of fun, no? But I was having second thoughts about that,
because I’d noted the 70 minutes it had taken me to reach the Vintage Bike
Cave, which was tolerable post rush-hour, but would be less so mid.
I
felt a little calmer after drinking mediocre coffee, and when I arrived through that
back door the Carlos looked as impressive as I had remembered it. A ride around the block did nothing to dampen
my enthusiasm and I knew that if there was any residual hesitation on my part,
now would be the time for it to reveal itself to me.
And so the
deal was done, the job was discussed (and left mutually open-ended), and I was
on my way.
The
man who worked on the lathe – the proprietor of the Vintage Bike Cave – had
scoffed at my reluctance to cycle back to Twickenham. It had been estimated that the journey – a
journey that involved dicing with death on London’s very terrible roads – would
take over an hour and a half, but I had already planned on riding to Gospel Oak
to take the train home from there. This
I attempted to do, although it was hard to know which way to go about it. At first I pushed my new bike down the
Archway Road as far as Upper Holloway, because I thought it might be a good
idea to see how long the walk would take, just in case I did indeed end up
working at the Vintage Bike Cave. On reaching the intersection beneath Archway Tower I realised that
Gospel Oak was too far from Highgate for this theory to make any sense,
estimating that it would take at least 20 minutes on foot, thus negating any
advantage the Silverlink Metro direct to Richmond might have to offer. I climbed onto the Carlos and started cycling
in the vague direction of Gospel Oak.
It
should be pointed out that when I had ridden the Raleigh Record Ace to my
courier I was struck by how comfortable it had felt. This was unexpected as I had been riding my Jamis
Beatnik in order to preserve the Raleigh for sale, and had got quite used to
that smaller machine. This physical amenity,
then, took me by surprise, but it reassured me that the Carlos – whose dimensions I had
measured to be almost exactly the same as the Raleigh – was probably of an
appropriate size (the new found comfort of the Raleigh had also motivated me in continuing to bid for the Pinarello). But now I had the Carlos with me I was convinced that it was smaller
than the Raleigh, although still bigger than my Jamis. This bode well for it assuaged any fears
that it might be either too big or too small, but the fact that I could
simultaneously consider it both left me rather perplexed.
Meanwhile,
my normally reliable sense of direction was letting me down. Meanwhile, the normally unreliable BBC
weather forecast was also letting me down – or not. ‘It would remain dry for the rest of the day,’
they had told me this morning, but now it started to rain. I found myself in Kentish Town again, but
knew I needed to be further west. I
took a turn down a road that furthered itself in a westerly direction, but it led me
straight into the bowels of an industrial estate. I retraced my steps and pushed my bike along
Kentish Town Road instead, for I knew I’d get very wet if I continued cycling. This allowed me to admire the reflection of
my new bicycle in the shop-windows I passed and assess its scale in proportion
to my own form.
I
went too far: found a map of the area just outside Camden Gardens and saw the
error of my ways, turned down Hawley Road, but on the wrong side, crossed over the
road to join Castlehaven Road, which I knew would take me to onto Prince of
Wales Road, allowing me to catch my train at Kentish Town West. As I got back on my new bike to ride up Castlehaven
Road, I noticed that my rear tyre had a puncture.
[POST-SCRIPT: I did eventually receive a response from the
Pinarello Guy, sent some weeks later and only picked up by me a few weeks after
that again. He explained that he was in no hurry to sell the bicycle and that he
happy to hang onto it if nobody offered what he considered to be a reasonable price. He assured me that the bicycle was not stolen
(I'm not sure where that notion came from), that he wanted to sell it to someone
who would appreciate it (admirable) and he intended to put it on eBay
again – with a reserve in place – but if I was still interested than I was
welcome to view the bicycle before bidding.
So far so very
reasonable, but then he went on to explain the point of putting a reserve price
in place – to keep it, in secret –
and that if I didn't like this method of doing business then there were
alternatives, both on eBay itself and on other websites (Gumtree, I
assume). Maybe that made no sense to me but it did to him – and others too,
apparently. It was
obvious I’d rubbed him up the wrong way.
He confirmed
that he had bought the new saddle prior to his decision to sell the bike and
that it was his prerogative to change his mind. I couldn't argue with that but I got the impression that he thought
that I was questioning the value he had placed on the bike itself, which was
not the case. I just thought that he hadn't done a great job in trying to sell
it. This was my reply:
‘Thanks for getting back to me - I only just picked this up as it wasn't sent to my email (or maybe it went to my spam?)
Everything makes a little more sense, now you've said you don't need to
sell and are prepared to wait (I never for one moment thought it was stolen, by
the way). It's just hard to know whether
something is worth bidding on when you have no idea what the seller is holding
out for. But you are right: it is a
beautiful bike, and you should expect more than £460 - I was never calling into
question your valuation. Unfortunately,
money is tight for me right now so I ended up buying a Carlos for £295. It's no Pinarello, but it rides well and
serves its purpose (and it’s sized right, which I could never be sure of with
the Pinarello).
Good luck with the sale - with that saddle it's got to be worth at
least £580. List it next time as a
Pinarello 'Veneto' (just the one t)
and hopefully someone will meet your reserve.’
I hoped he would not submit a
response this second time around – what would be the point? He evidently hoped to make more than £500,
but he’d only provided the bike’s measurements after I prompted him to do so,
and hadn't even spelled Veneto
right.]
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