Online selling using listing services comes with a couple of necessary evils one of which is feedback. I quickly developed a phobia for feedback during my early eBay days after shedding tears over a couple of negatives.
Leaving feedback was a tedious chore I avoided until some ebayer who thought the feedback component was the only part of the transaction that mattered would email to berate me. At which point I would pick a phase like “Thankyou for your prompt payment and I hope you enjoy your book” and then paste like mad until I have caught up, then for a week or so I would leave feedback for each sale as it occurred until I inevitably backslid and have to do a big catch up again.
This pattern of behaviour continued until got an irate message from a buyer asking me what sort of feedback I was leaving I checked and her feedback was
We Honestly Can Look After Your Dog
I had listed a copy of a Charlie and Lola book called We Honestly Can Look After Your Dog then left a feedback, copied it to paste to the next feedback but messed up the copy part so that the last but one thing I had copied went on the feedback line.
I apologised profusely but it was there to stay.
I then discovered you could automate feedback so to keep the customer satisfied I now leave feedback as soon as payment is received and I (almost) never have to look at it.
Several years passed and I created another eBay id principally to buy books and sell the odd book or two, all went swimmingly except for the dreaded manual feedback. One day I was idling past the eBay community boards and a thread caught my eye. The poster mentioned a medical condition with which I was not familiar so I copied it and pasted it into Google to find out what it was. I quickly discovered it was a joking reference to a condition that affected older gentlemen that whilst appearing genuine when read; saying it out loud make it quite clear it was only intended to provide vulgar amusement.
I then logged into my secondary account and thought I had better catch up on my feedback.
As you can probably imagine by now I left a feedback ‘copied’ and pasted into the next feedback and clicked send. To my horror the ‘medical condition’ flashed onto the screen. I tried to hit the back button but it was too late. I quickly emailed the buyer and explained what I had done and that I would contact eBay to ask them to removed it ASAP
A fairly fruitless discussion then ensued with apparently (a) Live Help part of which is reproduced here:
Me “I accidently left a rude expression as feedback for a member mxxxxxxxxxxxn”
EBay “You can actually make a follow up to the feedback that you’ve left to your buyer.”
Me “no Fxxxa it is a very vulgar expression which means a man’s xxxxx it cannot stay on the feedback”
EBay “That way, you can place the exact feedback comment”
Me “No that won’t do if you say it out loud to yourself you will understand”
EBay “I get what you mean. In order to get this remove right away, you may want to contact our Trust and Safety team about this.”
I emailed Trust and Safety
A couple of days later the feedback was removed
Mr eBay then gave me a nice red flag for feedback abuse
Buyer emailed me and said the book was great, and not to worry
So where do I enrol for Copy and Paste 101?
I have so much sympathy! But I have to admit–I laughed!