• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“So in the email you said you’d take three seventy-five,” I whispered, but unfortunately, after all of that, it really did come out more like a regular old everyday whisper, like something you’d whisper to someone who probably wasn’t crying and clinging to their son but who had their foot on the back of your seat in a movie theater.

Tina wiped the tears away and raised her head. “The guy that was coming tomorrow was going to offer me five hundred dollars,” she informed me.

“Five hundred?” I asked, somewhat surprised, and not in a whisper. “Okay, five? We can do five; consider it part of the pain and suffering, sure. Five. We can do five. Five is awesome. It’s awesome.”

And then I quickly counted out the $375 in cash I had brought and wrote a check for the remaining amount.

So while I don’t want to say that I swindled a widow out of an incredible stove, I am pretty sure I swindled a widow out of an incredible stove, even if she upped the ante on that last hand. When I went home that night and did some research, I saw that the same model that was sitting under a tarp in a storage place was selling regularly for considerably more, so I didn’t exactly feel that my compassionate finger touch was for nothing. The stove was in my kitchen by the weekend, and I cooked pancakes on the chrome griddle that following Sunday.

There was only one thing missing on the new old stove, and that was a working timer. It was completely forgivable and easily remedied; I went straight back to eBay, my reliable source for everyone else’s trash, and looked for a vintage one that matched the era of the stove.

I found several that fit the bill right away, marked one to watch, to see how high the bidding went. And, at the last second, I was outbid on the vintage Lux Presto timer in chrome. I moved on to my next-favorite timer, an old Mirro aluminum one, watched it, bid on it, and was outbid. And outbid again on the aqua Minute Minder.

Now, I have to say here that I am not an eBay novice. I found my stove on it, for shit’s sake. I know how it works, and I typically, with exceptions here and there, walk away with what I want for a fair-to-bargain price. But I was getting outfoxed every single time I bid on an old, perfect timer, and it was starting to make me mad. After losing three of them, it dawned on me that the winning bidder’s user name was becoming a little familiar.

As I went down the list of timers I’d lost, I thought it was odd that KOOKAROO, who outbid me at the last second on the Presto, was the same one who outbid me on the Mirro. The intrigue became deeper as I realized the winner was the same for the aqua Minute Minder, too.

What do you need with three old timers? I thought. How many stoves can one person have? How many pans of brownies is he making? Curious to see if KOOKAROO simply had the same taste that I did or if he was stalking me—because, after all, I was basically stalking him—I clicked on his profile, and that’s when I saw something weird.

KOOKAROO hadn’t bought just the three timers that I wanted. He had bought all kinds of timers—vintage timers, plastic timers, egg-shaped timers, and darkroom timers—and then had them shipped to Germany, where he apparently lived. One hundred fifty of them, and that was only what was listed on his feedback, which most likely was a slim margin of how many auctions he had actually won. He had not purchased one single thing aside from kitchen timers, and the 150 he had collected were in the past two weeks alone. That’s more than ten times a day. That’s a lot of brownies.

I wasn’t the only one who thought it was odd. Just to make sure it wasn’t me that the scenario wasn’t making sense to, I ran the facts and only the facts of the case by my best friend, Jamie, who is a scientist and approaches almost everything with the scientific method, except when it comes to picking a first husband. I told her everything about the outbidding, how many he bought, and that the guy had done this in the time span of two weeks.