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Showing posts from February, 2013

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Seventeen

This week I took the mincemeat of my mangled emotions and made meat patties. In my last blog I explained that I was left bruised and ego-impaired after I posted a link to this series in a Public Forum… of course I should have expected that when the title of my post read, “How to turn $100 into $500” when in fact I haven’t quite done it yet, and am doing it rather slowly… hence the mince meat I felt like as I entered into the new week. Probably because of despair or perhaps because a friend shouted me a subscription to World of Warcraft, I only managed to list twenty new items this week, keeping my stock at about the 300 mark for the past seven days… Nevertheless, it didn’t mean I was not busy with other things pertaining to this titanic task. For one thing I did not abandon the Trademe Message Board entirely, but have rather started a few random threads so that people will note me as a trader of interest and check out my stock. Threads like, “Hey has anyone ever been abducted by

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Sixteen

I was struck by a deep thought this week while listing some books that were well, books for ladies. You know the sort, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Bridget Jones’ Diary, that sort of thing. If I was dealing with a movie we have a description here in NZ that fits the type of film your female partner might drag you to, it’s called a “chick flick”. But if you can call a hopeless sob story involving unrealistic romance with a man that most real men would want to punch in the face a “chick flick” then would that make the paperback version of such a story a “chook book”? I was thinking along those lines when I realized to my dismay that Trademe have no category for such a book, and seeing as I had recently been donated a box load of the things (thank you donators, they’re awesome!) I was forced to list them under “general fiction”. But that wasn’t the only thing that upset me about my favourite online trader this week, because it was on this site I found myself the centre of a virtual bu

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Fifteen

What an awesome week. Seriously. Last week I felt like I was the Star Ship Enterprise at the end of Wrath of Khan, disintegrating in the atmosphere of planet Genesis in response to a very dramatic and heart rendering self destruct sequence. The nerdy Sci-Fi allegory will make sense later. When I last wrote I had a profound sense of having performed at my business like a hedgehog on a dinner plate. Never the less, as the old saying goes – Time and Chance happens to us all! No longer do I feel I have the business acumen of a rhinoceros, not after making my first $80 in a week so far! But I’m flying ahead of myself… Today I drove north to the lovely town of Whangaparaoa (pronounced fung-a-po-row-a) to collect the 100 Science Fiction books that I purchased to the bitter music of buyer’s remorse last week. But the despair I felt at overstocking last week melted away after having just sold a personal record number of books this week so as it turns out, buying all that stock in t

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Fourteen

I would like to call this entry, “The Art of Going Backwards”. I knew this week wasn’t going to be a good one. It’s the end of the Summer Break here in New Zealand and scores of children and awkward teenagers are flocking back to school while parents, myself among them, have returned to their jobs with wild abandon (yeah right)... in other words not many people are thinking about reading at the moment and my stock has had a lonely and boring week on the shelf with the fleas… That’s right, fleas! After returning from my glorious holiday in Oz we found our house had become occupied by the blood sucking kangaroo of all parasites, the flea, and for some reason they seem to love the room that I keep all my books in! I can’t seem to put a paperback away without becoming the dinner to at least 8 of the things dining in the all-you-can-eat restaurant of my legs! I’ve tried a bug bomb, but having been exposed to all that literature seems to have made them intelligently cunnning and they p