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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why the default action of most people is to feel compelled by whatever a company's accounting system tells them to do. Both this and that also-popular cable box story. There are two autonomous sides to every relationship. If you don't value your ability to use ebay again in the future at more than $2, give their customer service department a good-faith 15 minutes of your time to fulfill their elective processes. If you can't come to an agreement with that reasonable time expenditure, tell them to go screw.

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The problem with that is that they can forward it to a collection agency, whom when told to screw off, replies by screwing with your credit score.

So at that point you repudiate the debt again, this time to the collections agency. If they insist on unilaterally publicly claiming you owe money without any sort of actual proof, take them to court for slander. Clearly the buck stops somewhere, as I can't just call up a collection agency and tell them that bduerst owes me $1 for responding to his HN comment.

The fact that they only offer phone support is not a company doing its fair share to try to connect with me over problems. It's them putting up roadblocks to try to avoid having to deal with me. Given that, I don't feel I have the obligation to attempt to sit through their various roadblocks.

It was honestly far easier and satisfying to just give them the two bucks and then report the facts of my experience onto the internet.

Plus, with any luck someone thinking about selling on eBay in the future will run across this post, think twice, and be saved the trouble I was. So I feel pretty good about that too.

The choice you made was between the two options they gave you. Either outcome is part of their system, and perfectly fine by them. There was also third option wherein you notify them that the debt is invalid because no services were rendered, and that it is not your responsibility to convince their systems and processes of that fact.

This is true, but who has the time and energy to fight every stupid Kafkaesque battle like this?

You're right, I would have been better off making this point in the Comcast thread instead of the $2 ebay one. :P

Yup, and in the end, I'm fine with the choice I made - pay them and then let people know how awful the experience was. This has been worth $2 for me, I hope it was worth $2 for them.

The proof is that you listed the items which is clearly logged and visible.. The charge is for the listing not successfully completing an auction/sale.

See, this is a prime example of what I mean. There's no dispute that he listed items, so proof of such is irrelevant. However, you're taking the purported meaning of the cryptically phrased document-that-nobody-reads as immutable truth. Fact is that ebay failed to successfully execute the auction - they accepted bids from the guys in the back with the way-out-of-range numbers hand-drawn on cardboard.

>...cryptically phrased document-that-nobody-reads as immutable truth.

If you agree to use a service without reading the fine print, then you're obligated to what you agree to. "Nobody reads it" is not an excuse that a judge uses to nullify a contract.

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