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A little window, whether you wanted one or not, into the professional life of a hard-grafting Sandwich. Many of you will know that I sell on eBay for a living; mostly records / CDs, but I’ll chance my arm with any old piece of shite which comes (cheaply) my way. My eBay listings almost invariably contain the word “rare”, although I’ve got into the habit of overkilling it (eg *RARE!!!*) - and Pal has “rarely” (ho ho) missed an opportunity to rib me for it.
One word I won’t use, though, is “collectable”, for the simple reason that it’s meaningless. Pigeon droppings, toenail clippings and those bits you pull off the top of baked bean cans are “collectable”, if you’re so inclined. Many eBay sellers do use the word, and good luck to them - it’s their own time they’re wasting.
But what REALLY gets my easily-roused goat is when people who sell their junk at car boot sales (the source of most of my stock) use it. If their poverty-addled brains perceive that a piece of their tat is worth something (which it almost always isn’t), they’ll invariably hike the price and justify it by saying “S’clecter’s”(*). Obviously “S’clectaBLE” is out of the question, being a THREE-syllable mumble. Grrrr….
And those army guys think they have a tough job…
(* - apostrophe-before-S added for chav-thenticity.)
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 11:35 am and is filed under General, or uncategorized due to sloppy editing, Grammar, Irritating Things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’m reminded of my small hometown in Nova Scotia in the mid- to late-70s. My hippy/rocker friends and I would sometimes find ourselves at parties hosted by some of the local “gentry”. These were always good for a few laughs and lots of free beer. Invariably, though, after listening to several hours of Frampton Comes Alive or some other piece of dreck, one of the marks would pull out The Beatles (aka “The White Album”). He’d gaze rapturously at it for a moment and then, as if it were one of the tablets from the Mount, hold it up for everyone to behold. Suitably impressed, he and his friends would wax wondrously about how “rare” and “hard to come by” this “collector’s item” was. My friends and I would nudge each other and try to suppress guffaws as we wandered off in search of more premium beer and single-malt scotch…
Ah, he said, slipping into boring professional* mode, The White Album is something of a cleckter’s conundrum. Despite being amongst the best-selling of all Beatles LPs (and therefore quite easy to find on vinyl to this day), its initial runs were numbered, and the lower your number, the higher the value. Anything from 1-100 and you’re looking at upwards of £10,000. Many owners of “Frampton Comes Alive”, on the other hand, will pay YOU £10,000 to take the album off their hands.
* - as opposed to just “boring”.
I take your point about The White Album, Shit. I worked in a record shop for a couple of years in the early 80s and dabbled a bit in “collecting” for a few years. No expert or anything, mind you, but I do have some sense about what qualifies as “rare” or “hard to get”. In the period I was talking about in my first comment I didn’t know anybody who didn’t own a copy of The White Album.
Poor Frampton, I wonder if he’d get slagged so much if that album had only sold a million or two…
Interestingly, despite his Britishosity, the whole Peter Frampton thing never really happened over here - well, not to the same extent. “Frampton Comes Alive” is a decent enough album really; anyone who has short-term success will always be mocked by future generations. The Bay City Rollers probably outsold Pink Floyd 10:1 in 1975 (the year of Floyd’s best album IMO), but will always be tartan-clad figures of fun to anyone under 40 (or with a working set of ears).