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Anyone that's ever sold on eBay, or read the discussion boards, probably heard a seller complaining about a deadbeat buyer that is trying to get out of a purchase, saying that their kid pressed bid or buy while they were out of the room, and how that it was a complete load of unbelievable crap. As a seller, I was always among those first to roll their eyes and say "let them have it". Well, now that I've seen my own kid surfing eBay, I'm not quite so sure that the 'my kid did it' excuse is bogus... I was sitting here in my office last week with Nicholas, trying to get him to decide what he wanted for his birthday. I ended up going on eBay and doing a search for Thomas (the Tank Engine), and looking at all the wooden railway stuff with him. He can't get enough of this, we pretty much have to browse through and look at each individual listing for anything new and different. Naturally, I don't really have the patience to sit here for three days straight with him and look at 7486 different items, I usually browse with him for a while and pick out all the unique stuff that we've never seen before and have a look. Now, normally after we've done a little window shopping on eBay, he will start asking to look for new Thomas stuff on eBay about 3 times a day. He just loves to look at all the different stuff, he's totally obsessed. Of course, I have better things to do, so I try to weasel out of it as much as possible. Well, the time has come that I really need to delete my sign-in information from the prefilled/saved passwords in Firefox, because the clever little bugger, at the age of 5 (and just, it was his birthday a few days ago), has discovered the Firefox search bar (on his own, I never use that for searches, I go directly to the engine or site I'm searching) and discovered the little drop down menu to select the search engine to use, in this case eBay. And despite not really being able to read, can recognize, and re-type, the word Thomas. And away he went. Browsing eBay. Fortunately, I wasn't signed in (I've started closing the browser when I leave the room), because when I woke up from my nap, there he was sitting on the first page you get after you click "Buy". (Yes, "Buy" is one of the other words he seems to recognize quite well!) I was like, how did you get there, who helped you? "I did it by myself. See!" Geez. And I know it wasn't because he watched me do it - like I said, I don't use the Firefox search box, I go right to eBay. So it wasn't even a case of just hitting the arrow keys and going through the history until Thomas was in the box. He started getting a little more clever later on too, bringing some of his engines down and copying their names off the bottoms, and searching their names too. Smartass. So if you're an eBay seller, the next time some buyer comes along and says I didn't bid on this, my kid must have done it.... it might not be the lame, bald-faced lie that we've always assumed it to be! (And if you've got kids, and you're an eBay user...keep those credit cards out of reach! I'm glad I already hide my wallet from the older kids, because Nicholas knows all too well what a credit card does!) |
