Sunday, August 9, 2009

Branching Off - Annoyances

I've always been a collector of sports cards. Well, ever since I was six years old. So that makes thirty years of card collecting. It's always been 99.5% sports cards too. But lately I've been making a foray into non-sports cards. I've bought a little here and there over the years, a TV show I'm a fan of here and a cool movie there. But lately I've noticed some hard-signed autos of actors and actresses that I'm a fan of and thought, what the heck.

Now, I'm not a fan of the sticker autographs. I never use to care either way but over the past few years they just seem more and more impersonal. The companies could take those damn autographed stickers and put them on anything... and what happens in 10 years time... or 20 years time when the sticker becomes less sticky. So I've limited myself to hard-signed autos. But my other pet peeve so far seems a little more random. I find that dealers on eBay who sell non-sports cards send the cards they've sold in a very slow fashion. When I win a sports card on eBay, 9 times out of 10, the card is in the mail the next day and in my hands within about 5 days. With non-sports cards, 9 times out of 10, the card takes about 3 weeks to get in my hands.

An extreme example happened recently. I won two non-sports autographed cards on eBay on July 20th from the same seller. 12 working days passed and I still had not rec'd the cards. The next day I rec'd an email telling me that "Congratulations! Your cards have been shipped." Shipped!?!? It took him 12 working days, not including the weekend, to put two cards in plastic holders, toss them in an envelope, and send them off. Yikes! This is an extreme example but I must say my other dealings with non-sports eBayers aren't all that different.

In the end, I still want the cards. I'm a collector... it's what I do. And I'll always be a patient man if it gets me what I want. However, it doesn't mean I can't be a tad annoyed at the service. Luckily, they're not relying on tips.

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