How to Buy a Gazebo on eBay

Why you would want to buy a gazebo on eBay is beyond me. The last one I saw was made of marble. Do you realize how much the shipping on that monster would be? It would probably cost almost as much as buying the gazebo itself. Then, you’d need a crane and a construction crew to unload it from the truck and put it together at your house. Are you really sure you want a gazebo? Well, if you do, here’s how to buy one…

1. Look up the word “gazebo” on Dictionary.com so that you can be sure you know what you’re talking about. You don’t want to get tricked into buying a false gazebo, just because you don’t know what you’re looking for.
2. Check for gazebos on Wikipedia.com. That should give you a pretty good history of gazebos. You’re buying a piece of history here, so you should know what gazebos are all about. Don’t forget to check out the etymology of the word “gazebo.” You wouldn’t want to misuse it.
3. By now, you’re probably tired of looking at your computer. Take a break, go down to the local Starbucks and buy me a Peppermint Mocha. You can buy something for yourself too, if you’d like.
4. Get on eBay and do a search for “gazebo.” Make sure you don’t misspell it, or who knows what you’ll end up with.
5. Notice that you’ve got a lot of junk that you don’t want. I mean, how are you going to hold a party in a 9” tall gazebo or a picture of a gazebo? You need to get rid of all that other junk. The easiest way to do that is to click no Home & Garden in the filters. That way, there’s a much better chance that the gazebos you see will be big enough to get inside.
6. Spend the next 4 hours perusing in detail all 6,432 gazebos listed on eBay. Remember, you aren’t allowed to get up from your chair, get a glass of water, or go to the bathroom in that time. That’s why you got your coffee first.
7. Save the gazebos you like to your watch list. That way, you can waste more time looking at them again.
8. Yes, you’ve got it, that’s the next step, go back and look at all the ones you liked one more time, so that you can pick out a favorite. Don’t bother removing the ones you decide you don’t like from your watch list, you don’t want to lower the confusion factor.
9. Once you’ve spent another two hours narrowing it down to your favorite, you’re ready to put in a bid. Make sure you don’t put in too high a bid, after all, this is eBay… you know, it’s got to be cheap.
10. Sit there biting your nails for the next day or two, while you wait for somebody to outbid you. That won’t happen until the last 15 seconds, so that you don’t have enough time to outbid the outbidder.
11. Throw something at a wall, yell into a pillow, jump up and down, and otherwise act immature because you didn’t get what you wanted.
12. Go back to step seven and repeat the cycle as many times as necessary, getting more desperate each time, so that you are settling for something you don’t like as much and bidding higher and higher.
13. Eventually you will win a gazebo that you don’t really want, at a price that’s more than you wanted to pay, and with exorbitant shipping to boot.
14. Don’t forget to pay! As eBay says, when you bid, you enter into a contract to buy the gazebo of somebody else’s dreams once you bid.
15. Wait for your gazebo to get there, grumbling all the while about having paid too much.
16. Try not to be there when the delivery truck arrives, hoping that they’ll send it back. However, they won’t send it back, they’ll park your nice new gazebo right in front of your door.

There you have it. Now, are you sure you really want to buy a gazebo on eBay? Wouldn’t you rather take that money and go on vacation somewhere that has a gazebo you can look at? It would be whole lot easier, and maybe even cheaper. No matter what, it will definitively be less stressful.

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Note from author: There is no slight intended against eBay in this satire. I buy regularly via eBay and have never had anywhere close to this bad an experience. Like much of satire, this is an exaggeration, intended to make things look much worse than they actually are. eBay is a wonderful business and I personally appreciate them. This, on the other hand, was just written for fun.

The Monday Conspiracy

Let me start by saying that I’m really not into conspiracy theories, although I have seen a few that make me wonder…  Anyway, have you ever noticed how many people don’t like Mondays? I used to think that it was people’s imaginations when they said that Mondays were always bad. It was like they were expecting it to be bad, so they were looking for it to be bad, so they had a bad attitude, so everything ended up being bad. Kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nevertheless, I have finally found compelling evidence that shows me that Mondays are truly a conspiracy. Yes, they’re a conspiracy to make us hate 1/7 of our life. Why anyone would want to make so many people miserable is beyond me. However, there is no question that there is a secret society, whose sole goal is to make everyone hate Mondays. What? You don’t believe me? Look at this:

• Almost all workplaces start the work week on Monday. If there were no conspiracy, why wouldn’t some of them start on Tuesday, or Wednesday?
• There are no traffic jams on Saturday of Sunday, yet every Monday morning, millions of people are stuck in a long line of creeping traffic.
• Many companies pay on Friday, ensuring that their employees blow their paychecks over the weekend and have to go back to work on Monday.
• Monday night football has much lower viewership than Sunday football, showing that most people are too tired and too bummed out to even watch football.
• Less is accomplished in any workplace on Mondays than any other day of the week, except Fridays. Of course, on Fridays, everyone is too busy thinking about the weekend to think about work.
• If it weren’t for Mondays, everyone could have a perpetual weekend. While not much work would get done, people would be happier, doing what they want to do, rather than doing what they have to do.

So, why is it that this secret society is working so hard to ruin everyone’s Mondays? The only thing that makes sense is to try and get people to quit their jobs. Yes, this society is against the free enterprise, capitalistic system that makes our economy strong. They’re working to being down industry, making America a country of unemployed people who are dependent upon government aid to function.

This clearly must be a move on the parts of our foreign competitors. If the old Soviet Union was still around, I’d say that they were a prime candidate. However, with their demise, we must look elsewhere. It seems that it would have to be some of the Pacific Rim countries, who are benefiting from American companies sending our manufacturing jobs overseas.

Think of it. If the Chinese or Japanese can get us to quit being a productive society, they guarantee that we’ll buy their products. There won’t be any “buy American” campaigns, because there won’t be any American products to buy. All they have to do is get American’s to quit producing, and they guarantee their market dominance for the next 50 years or more. Quite a business strategy, isn’t it?

You have to realize that to stop working doesn’t mean that we’ll stop consuming. We’re the biggest society of consumers in the world. Our lives are built around consuming; we’re taught how to be consumers from the first moment we look at a television. So, of course, we’ll keep on consuming.

What’s that? How will we keep on consuming when we’re not working? Simple; credit cards. The average American already spends ten percent more than they earn. So, if you take away the income side of the equation, then we can manage to spend 110 percent of what we earn. Actually, it’ll be more than that, since we’ll have more time to consume, without all that pesky time lost working.

So, there you have it. Don’t fall for that conspiracy. Embrace your Mondays! Be part of the one percent that actually enjoys going to work! Don’t let foreign competition break you down!