The man who eBayed

There's not many things that I look up to my father for. His taste in music is varied, but annoying, his grasp of technology is nonexistant, and his cookery seems to extend only to macarconi cheese with mashed potatoes and broad beans or indescribably tasteless Chilli. However, if there's anything that I truly admire my father over, it's his eBaying skills. Somehow this usually mildly technophobic man is suddenly in his element when put in front of an ebay search page. Want cheap ink cartridges? He'll find three for the price of half. Need an item that's about to go? He snipes his items with a marksman-like precision. Want the teddy bear you gave away as a child? ...He's working on that. That's my mother's mid life crisis coming through, so you can't expect that to be a reasonable task. There's one going in 14 hours for over £50...
And yet in five years of guerilla ebaying, he's never got one negative comment. Every single person who has dealt with my father seems to have found him to be communicative, friendly, quick to pay, and/or fast to post. It's just not something I can seemingly live up to. Hell, stuff I want tends to get sniped from me left, right and center! I tried to buy a GameBoy (original 1991, looked in good condit, takes 4xAA batteries) today, only to see it flutter away from my eyes right at the last minute.

So here's to you, Dad, you who showed me that the 'Buy it now' button means 'Pay loads more than neccessary (actually, I've found a couple of cases where this isn't true, but that's only because I know my videogames), the man who can send a cheque faster than most people can send a paypal payment, the man who sniped goods before sniping became popular and eBay introduced the 'maximum bid' feature in an attempt to cull it. The man who eBayed.