21 March 2004

I have never bought a fine classic car from an antique dress boutique, but apparently I did last night.

There was some confusion in the residence and I was not at the top of game.

Maryland had just lost a close one in the second round of the NCAA tournament and the top was down on my convertible. It was beginning to rain, and I was forced to skip the controversy over whether the incumbent President of Taiwan had arranged to have himself shot to influence the election and whether or not Osama or his top lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri were in one of the mud-brick compounds in Waziristan.

The clock was also ticking on an auction. I could not pay much attention to it until the game was over. By the time the last 9 seconds had played out and it was for sure that the Terps had gone down, there were only 38 minutes to go.

Friday night I had been on-line car shopping. I started with bizarre American Motors products. One was a 1959 Ambassador station-wagon in an impossible dusty mauve with preposterous tail-fins. It was identical to the vehicle that my family drove to the West Coast when it was brand new.

That was fun, and I got hooked. I never had a really hot car when I was a kid, the closest one being my Mother's 1968 343-cubic inch Javelin. I migrated from real cars of my past to dream cars. I found a '68 Mercedes 280SL that she really liked. I had to agree. All the SL models have appealed to me down through the years. In the fifties, Mercedes put the 190 on the street, powerful and rounded, and followed it up with the lean 280 in the 1960's.

The lines of the car were spare and elegant. There were several in marvelous condition. The prices for these antiques were right around what they cost when they were new. I wondered if I should take a chance and bid on one. The eBay thing is as compelling as gambling, which of course is exactly what it is.

I had the fever. One way or another I am going to get a raise this week and I was itching to spend it. I rationalized the fact that I needed to get another car, since with any luck my sons are both going to be working this summer and they will need another set of wheels to get through the summer.

I had made a serious offer on a car I didn't need earlier in the week- a 1962 Rambler American that probably didn't work and needed a new top. It was in Phoenix, too, which made it all completely impractical. But the excitement of watching the seven-day auction go by, waiting to pounce at the last moment was a real kick. It closed at midnight on the West Coast, hours after I went to bed, and I placed what I thought was a commanding bid and drifted off on the Murphy bed.

I was intensely relieved to discover that I had lost the final bid by $50.

I looked at most of the available Mercedes SLs in the country. Some were pretty tired, and some were just like they had rolled out of the factory. The prices ranged from nothing to $80,000 dollars. It was very erotic, skipping around, imagining her hair ruffled by the wind at the wheel of those magnificent machines.

I stumbled on one that arrested me. There were dozens of pictures of a dark green 1972 Mercedes-Benz 350SL Convertible Roadster. Hard and soft tops. "Purchased from the estate of an auto repair and body shop owner, this beauty was always stored away from the elements in a warehouse along with his collection of approx. 20 luxury vehicles, and driven for pleasure only."

It was a creampuff. Pleasure only. Powerful 4.5 liter, Iron-block V8 Engine, independent suspension, 3 speed automatic transmission, Bosch electronic fuel injection, power steering, air conditioning, AM/FM radio. Pick up like a rocket with classic Mercedes-Benz lines that are never outdated. Two tone pin stripe. The Michelin radial tires look good, original alloy wheels. Virtually no rust on the entire car. Vinyl bucket seats. Original carpets in good condition the headliner original and free of rips.

I looked at the condition of the engine compartment and trunk. They were clean enough to dine on and the truck appeared to barely have been used. What's more, My hands began to twitch.

But there was no way to accurately tell what the price was going to be. The auction was going to close the next night. I surfed the web on-and-off through the day. The prices varied by the amount of my annual salary. I had no idea what my maximum bid should be, or whether I had the nerve to sit on top of the auction until the penultimate moment.

But my doom was sealed, though I did not know it. In my agitation and relief over the Rambler, a friend had helpfully provided the answer to the eBay uncertainty.

It is in the last minute of the on-line auction that everything goes crazy. If you are not there to monitor it, you will probably lose. Which can be a good thing, but there is an automated solution. To take advantage of the power of the computer, companies have spring up that do the work for you. It is called sniping. You can set up a bid on an external website with your best-and-final bid. With ninety minutes to go it will automatically send you an update on the status of the bidding, all the while keeping your interest anonymous. The beauty of this program is that with 6 seconds to go until the auction, a winning bid is sent. It leaves no time for a human to respond.

Bingo, you win.

And that is exactly what happened. I missed the 90-minute update, worrying about stupid basketball games I could do nothing about. I sat down at the computer with a half-hour to go. The bidding was going up slowly, a hundred dollars at a pop. There was a banner that said the seller's reserve price had not been met. Even if I won the auction, if the reserve was not covered there would be no sale. It protected the seller.

I hit "refresh" every couple minutes. The bidding continued to inch up, now over $10,000 and the banner flicked out. The reserve had been met. This was serious. As we got to the end-game, less than a minute to go, I realized it was exactly like the Maryland basketball game. The last seconds stretched out into infinity as I hit refresh as fast as I could.

My bid showed upright on schedule, six seconds to go, and the car was mine. The other bidders didn't know what hit them.

I celebrated by sending off a self-congratulatory e-mail to the seller and made preparations to go to bed, wondering who loaned money to buy thirty year-old-cars. I looked at the screen one last time and saw a late note from a pal in Florida. He said to look out for eBay, and said he had been burned three times by unscrupulous sellers. One of their tactics is to purloin the identities of legitimate vendors. There is a lot of that going around.

I pondered that. The note said that if you looked at sales history to verify the history of the vendor and compared what you were bidding on, I might find some startling discontinuities. Ladies that sold lace doilies with excellent track-records suddenly becoming electronics moguls. It was a danger signal.

I went back and looked at history of the person selling the Mercedes.

I scrolled down the list. It was long, and excellent history of reliability. But I saw that there were no cars in the list, only dresses. My seller ran a lady's apparel shop, specializing in antique clothes.

Uh oh, I thought.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra