kicked off the bay

since i used to fly around a fair amount, i was able to earn some southwest reward vouchers. the neat thing about southwest reward vouchers is that they are fully transferable, meaning you can sell it to other people. since i had a voucher that was pretty close to expiring, i decided to try selling it on ebay. a quick search for comparable items on ebay revealed that ebay would not allow the sale of such items. instead, people sold white envelopes and gave the winner a free reward voucher as a gift. so i proceeded to list a white envelope for sale, along with a reward voucher as a gift.

a scant 5 hours later, i checked my email to find a kind letter from the authorities at ebay informing me that my listing was removed due to a prohibited link to a website (southwest.com). there was no link in my item posting, so i can only assume that they real reason was that they objected to the free gift i offered with my item. interestingly enough, in the 5 hours that my item was available, i received two emails from people saying they would be willing to purchase my "white envelope" in the (apparently likely) event that ebay took my listing down. and i was ultimately able to sell my voucher via these means.

so the moral of the story is: even if you aren't allowed to sell stuff on ebay, you can still sell stuff on ebay.

change

i hate change. pennies are completely useless and coins in general are annoying to keep around. really, the only thing it's good for is feeding vending machines. so i went to the vending machine to spend my dreaded coins and decided upon a 80 cent item. i fed the machine four quarters and it spit out my snack along with my change. now any ordinary person would expect twenty cents in change to come in the form of two dimes. yet, when i went to collect my change, i found nickels! this extra change defeats the purpose of going to the vending machine in the first place! not even vending machines like change...