EBay and her do not mix

OK, onto where I left off about my mother-in-law... that dreadful phone call asking if she could move in. I did not want her to move in, I figured that the past 8 years was long enough. I knew that once she moved in, I could not get away because I was no longer in school nor could I drive. But on January 1, 2006 she moved in. She put me through a lot during this time that she lived with us, but since it was a couple of years ago I do not want to bore you with the details. Although I will say that she sold the new house... well actually she did not sell it, instead she gave it back to the original owner... and then she got herself a part-time job as a housekeeper at a motel up here, so she could have the income to put in the income box on the Visa form to get Rassell over here. She then asked me to sell all of the items (mostly bridesmaid dresses) on eBay that were left over from a big sale we had scheduled.


They (Sharon and Joanne her sister-in-law) had rented a hotel conference room at to have the sale in. Joanne wasn't going to be there so Sharon had asked me to go to help her with the money and things. She didn't do much for the decorating of the room, all she did was match up the dresses by their colors and throws them on a table... so all the blue dresses were all scattered in one pile and all of the red dresses were in another pile but thankfully all of the wedding dresses were hung up. When the doors had opened we were busy with a lot of onlookers and some buyers but not a lot of buyers.


Joanne showed up later in the afternoon, I should have gone home then but for some reason I didn't. After she showed up we didn't get any more shoppers... not even browsers! At the end of the day we were packing up the dresses that were left for me to put on eBay. Joanne knew that I was going to put the items on eBay, so she folded up the dresses and put them in boxes that was labeled blue dresses, red dresses, green dresses, etc. and she wrote down the size of each dress like kept the list for herself.


I had never sold anything... heck I never even bought anything before... On eBay before so I did not know what I was doing. I was going to sell the simple items like the flowers and the gloves first. I kept getting e-mails from people asking me for pictures or a more thorough description especially when I was trying to sell the dresses. Since neither of them knew the specific sizes or description of each dress, I had my friend Candy come over on a weekend that Sharon would be gone. We opened the boxes and took pictures, when we opened the boxes all of the dresses were really wrinkled and some were not in a proper labeled box. There were black dresses in the box labeled purple dresses and none of the dresses looked the same... so it is a good thing we opened the box or else I would have sold a box of the purple dresses and that person wouldn't have gotten what they pay for and I may have gotten in trouble or even sued by the person! When Sharon returned all she could do was blame Candy for not folding things when she put the dresses back in to their boxes. That made me very angry because I know for a fact that Candy folded the dresses carefully and took some good shots! She wouldn't believe that Joanne (her precious sister-in-law) was partly to blame.

I then sold a couple of the dresses on eBay, the pictures and a better description helped out a lot (plus too I was selling the dresses individually instead of in bulk... selling about 10 mismatched dresses in a box... like I was told by Joanne to do. So Sharon decided to take all the wedding dresses down to Joanne and model the dresses and take pictures for me. They also wrote down a description of each dress. The pictures turned out really good but the descriptions were bad so I ended up rewriting them, the only thing I had trouble with was the sizes. I could say if the dress was a size 10 or a 12 but I could not give the answers to the bust size or anything like that.


Since I was working with Sharon on this eBay venture, I was really starting to see that she had absolutely no concept of money. She did not understand that you have to pay some seller fees regardless if you sold the items or not and that's why he she was not making the same amount that we had put down for she knew nothing about eBay either. I was starting to get a big headache every time I tried to explain this to her so after a while I just gave up and started paying the seller fees out of my share, so I wouldn't make any money but I was doing all of the work!