A consumer protection feature by everyone’s favorite butterball, The Fat Kid. . .
COLUMBUS -- As you may have read, I bought an iPod from eBay. Because I’m an iDiot, that’s why. I was in a bind because my computer is so old that new iPods aren’t compatible with it, and I’m in no position to replace my computer. Plus, I was greedy. I figured I could get a hella-big iPod from the pre-video era for hella-cheap. Of course, that turned out not to be the case, but that isn’t the point.
While deciding exactly how I was going to go about getting my iPod, I decided that rather than buying from an individual, I would buy from a “legitimate” seller, by which I mean a group of people who think up new and innovative ways to fleece you. This I did on Sunday, the second of March. Because of the blizzard, it did not arrive until Monday, the tenth. After all that waiting, as noted in the previous article, my iPod did not work. Well, this evening, I visited a local Apple store, where a hipster with a day-and-a-half’s worth of stubble and a $100 haircut told me that the reason my iPod was showing the screen pictured below was that it needed to be plugged into a wall charger. You see, it turns out that the model iPod I have “was originally boxed with a wall charger,” [I’m quoting the hipster with the hair] an item I won’t be able to get along without.
So, lesson one: when fleecing fat people through eBay, “legitimate” sellers might neglect to say which important parts are not included. Then, once they have your money, they can just tell you, as they told me, that if the product they sold you doesn't work without parts that were not included in the sale, you should just go buy them, and stop bothering the seller's asyntactical customer service rep. To wit, Heather from customer service advised me, "If you have a wall charger, please try this to see if it fixes the problem. If you do not have a wall charger, If you know someone with a charger please use theirs or You can also go to a local retail store that sales [sic] ipods [sic]."
Translation: We already have your money, and it's going to be easier for you to buy a wall charger than to try, possibly unsuccessfully, to get your money back from us, so consider yourself fleeced. Please mark your forehead: Sucker.
It seems that the “legitimate” seller expected me either to have a wall charger already, or to be dependent upon my friends with iPods that are so old that they came with wall chargers (of which I have zero), and they didn’t see fit to give me fair warning of any of this.
To make a long story short, this evening I took a drive to an execrable place, the Easton Mall, and bought a $30 wall charger.
So, as a lesson to all of you would-be buyers from “legitimate” sellers, I’m going to keep a running tab of how much I will really spend on my “$66” iPod.
1. iPod: $66
2. Shipping: $14.99 (That’s right, “legitimate” sellers all have outrageous shipping prices to make their actual sales prices look smaller, a strategy they learned from the juggernaut of corporate indifference, Amazon.com.)
3. Wall charger that they knew but failed to tell me I needed: $29.99
Total (thus far): $110.98 We’re only $38.02 away from the cost of a new iPod.
And the best news is that the iPod is so old that, according to the guy with the haircut, the battery is probably pretty much shot anyway, which means I might have to get what’s called an “out of warranty battery replacement,” that costs $70.
Check back for updates from my dumb ass.
Oh, and also we’ll be talking more about the aliens and stuff soon.
