Today’s Perfect Moment is relief. Not genuine, earth shaking relief, but just your average, small time relief.  Regardless of what kind of relief it was, I will sleep better tonight.

You see, I found myself in an online auction. I had successfully avoided the temptation of joining until late Wednesday night. Maybe it would be better to call it early Thursday morning.  Everything up for auction was early Canadian and would look good in my collection.

I consulted the fine print and found out that the shipping costs seemed rather high….very high. The starting price for shipping was 8 US dollars and fifty cents more for every item added to the bill.  This seemed rather steep, considering the items were, at the time of bidding, going for less than a dollar.

Despite my reluctance and bad math, I plunged into the auction and bid on about 20 different things. I figured that if I was going to pay that much for shipping, I was going to make it worth my while.  Unfortunately, many of the items had automatic rebids put in by other buyers.  If I bid one dollar, it automatically bid a dollar twenty-five–up to whatever maximum the original bidder specified.  In the end, I had “successfully” bid on eleven items.

I woke this morning to a message from the auction saying I had been outbid by someone. The message also explained that I had time to bid again.  This happened numerous times during the day.

By the time I finished work and reached home, my roster of winning bids that had equalled 12 was now down to 3.

I started doing math in my head and was less and less happy about this auction. The shipping was going to seem high forever.

I considered making more bids, or bidding on different items. Neither seemed like a good idea.

Then one of the three was successfully poached from me. Before long, my once proud stable of three fell to one solitary item.  I felt conflicted.  I didn’t want to pay the high shipping costs, but I wanted the items.

In the end, shortly after my second last item was gobbled up by some more experienced auction attendee, so was my final one. Oddly though, I  didn’t feel sadness, but rather relief.  I wasn’t on the hook for any money I promised.