Thanks for the kind words. I, too, am more worried about the ruining of a round robin than the intentional gouging of a couple bucks, but it's distressing to see a fellow human being selling his reputation and credibility for so little in return. A few months ago, I participated in a very successful "shotgun" round robin which was a lot of fun and over with very quickly.

One of the several business-related cartoons I have on my desk at work is a slogan, "We Screw The Other Guy... And Pass The Savings On To You." I am reminded of that whenever Vic posts a trade offer along with his trademark smiley face icons, which he admitted were used only to piss off people who were annoyed with him already. He's scammed me on the postage, ruined a round-robin for everyone downstream from him, and figures it can all be forgiven and forgotten with a few smiley faces.

Chuck T has a good point, though, as does Bill Thompson who emailed me privately, in that these extended discussions/arguments do not need to go on so long, and I agree. So I'll confine myself to "reminding" Vic about his "open issues" only once for every time he posts a trade offer, for the benefit of any new guys, and to keep the width of the threads down since we all have more important things to do, like enjoying the hobby.

But Vic is either very much mistaken, or less than honest, about his shipping charge fiasco. His position is that he does not combine shipping on separate chip lots, but the fact remains that he sent all nine chips in a single envelope, thus combining shipping. His secondary reason is that the final winning bids weren't as high as he'd like them to be so the excess shipping and handling goes toward that, which betrays a complete lack of understanding on how auctions work.

WMD