OK, I confess.. I am a sniper. If I find a chip I want, I put a watch on it and and wait until the last possible moment to put in my bid. I then bid the maximum amount I am willing to pay for the chip and I either win it.. or someone that wanted it more than me wins it. The high bid always wins, no matter when the bid is placed.. unless you bid later than the #2 bidder and are not a full bid increment above that person. There are several reasons for sniping.. avoiding a bidding war, not having someone come along and plink away at you until they either go over your high bid or run you up, and not having someone tail you to all the good auctions you manage to uncover.

There are times when it is inconvenient to be sitting in front of the computer waiting to get off that perfect snipe.. like when friends are coming over, when you have to go to work, or if you occasionally might want to get in a few hours sleep between bidding on ebay and monitoring the chipboard. For these instances there are several commercially available sniping programs available at a moderate cost. Though using these programs is not nearly as sporting or as fun as manually sniping, they are effective, and can return some sense of normalcy and balance to your life if you are addicted to ebay.

There are other alternatives though.. I had been meaning to keep this "pet" project of mine under wraps.. but I am ready to confess now.. being too cheap to purchase one of those readily available sniping programs, I decided instead to teach my cat how to snipe for me. This way he can stop being a freeloader and earn his keep in kitty litter and meow mix. Cats are naturals with a mouse.. so this was a perfect idea.. just give him a little catnip and he is good to snipe all day.. his average snipe time is 6 seconds.

Here is a picture of him watching the computer screen intently getting ready to execute the next snipe for me.