Boss Radio

Somebody with remarkably similar musical taste to my own has been advertising an enormous CD collection for sale on eBay. Naturally I started doing what any sane individual with a few thousand quid in their pockets would do and began buying up vast quantities.

Unfortunately I an an insane individual who doesn't have a few thousand quid in his pockets. In fact I have (Hold on a minute...) £3.28 and a plectrum that was on the cover of a magazine about 5 years ago. Fortunately I do have a little more than that in the bank.

Nevertheless I decided it might be circumspect to buy a little more prudently and started picking out those hard to find items that I really had to have.

Meanwhile others had discovered this list and had started bidding against me, the swine, toerags, unmitigated pondscum (I may be being a little unfair on unmitigated pondscum here...), but I noticed something odd about them. Most of them hadn't got the hang of bidding the most you're prepared to pay and leaving it at that. They were pecking away at my bids until they topped them, so all I had to do was to be online at the end of the bidding time and bid so close to time-out that no one could nip on and outbid me. After missing out on one more CD to a lightning fingered barbarian with more money than sense me, I worked out that I needed about 10 seconds to spare.

So I got the unignorable alarm that my sister had bought me for this very purpose, and programmed it to get me online just before the next item came up.

It worked. I snatched three CDs from right under the noses of these poor unsuspecting fools. Then the internet decided that I wasn't playing fair.

Two almost-impossible-to-get CDs showed up, and just before time there I was, bid programmed in and watching the timer run down. 9 seconds to go and I hit return. churn churn churn. Confirm your bid. churn churn churn. Sorry the auction has ended.

Aaugh!...

I now seem to have entered the land of the network congestion nightmare. If I allow 13 seconds my bid shoots in and allows someone with at least a 15Mb connection who can also apparently type even faster than me a whole 6 seconds with which to top me. If I leave it till 7 seconds network congestion springs out of that netherworld that is the devil's backside and stalls my bid. Oh. Except for once when, just to prove the conspiracy, I bid on a CD that I didn't really want that much as I already had nearly everything on it. That one I won. OK, so it was only 3 quid, but that's a lot to pay for one track.

Particularly since it turns out to be on two of the CDs that I've already bought.

With a geranium behind each ear and his face painted with gay cavalistic symbols, 6' 8", 17 stone police seargent Geoff Bull looked jolly convincing as he sweated and grunted through a vigorous twist routine at the Frug a-Gogo Bierkeller. His hot serge trousers flapped wildly over his enourmous plastic sandals as he jumped and frugged and gyrated towards a long-haired man.

"Uh, excuse me, man, I have reason to believe you that can turn me on," he leered suggestively.

As if by magic dozens of truncheons appeared and proceeded to mercilessly thrash him.

Poor Geoff, what a turnup for the book.

- Bonzo Dog "Rhinocratic oaths" -

I know just how he felt.