In which I publicly admit to stealing resources* from my employer.

I’ve been running a little eBay side business from my desk this week. In between calls I’ve watched my auctions, printed shipping labels (with the work printer, on the work paper*), and packed Priority Mail cartons with old electronics (and taped them shut with work tape*).

I made $282.11 from four auctions. This amount is over half what I paid for the items originally, but that little bit of awesomeness isn’t even the point. The point is that if you write a good item description on eBay, you can sell ANYTHING. Even if it’s old and crappy!

The eBook sold for $101.11, which is about $15 less than a brand new one costs. (I under-quoted shipping, though, so I ended up having to spend an extra $4.55 to get the thing mailed off, making my net $96.56, which is still more than I expected to get.) One of the Pocket PCs, the e400, sold for $36 to a company that sells refurbished devices and I’m wondering if they’ll part it out or resell it on their website. The final Pocket PC sold for $99 to what sounds like a company name rather than an individual so it may find itself re-refurbished or parted out, too.

The best part of all this is that the money I got (plus $130 in Xmas money) has allowed me to order this:

[You are now hearing a very loud, angelic “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!,” btw.]

Innit ADORABLE?!?!!? It’ll be here next Wednesday.

It’s an ASUS Eee 900HA 8.9″ notebook with a 160GB hard drive, a 1.6Ghz ATOM processor, and pre-installed XP Home. (I was going to order another gig of RAM too, but they were out, so that will have to wait until I can find it elsewhere.)

I also bought an external USB CD+DVD-RW drive because my new, tiny, adorable little ASUS laptopette doesn’t have a built-in drive. I don’t want to have to share a drive over my network just to watch a movie or burn a CD.

The moral of this story is that you can totally sell old junk on eBay, and use the proceeds to buy shiny new things!

Now, can somebody make it next week already so that I can start playing with my new notebook, plz? Kthxbai.

—
*I probably owe BMI about 6 minutes of unpaid work after all that rampant thievery.
**This public admission of unlawfulness is all part of my attempt to join my brother in his county jail weight loss regime.