It was 1 a.m. and I was paying the monthly bills in my favorite home accounting program, Quicksand ("Track your finances as they sink below the surface"). As I finished up, I discovered something extraordinary: I had a $20 surplus. Wow! I had no idea that Quicksand displayed totals in a color other than red.

But what was I going to do with all that money? The answer was obvious. I was finally going to check out one of those online auctions you hear so much about. So I set my browser to the biggest auction site of them all: iBroke.com.

If you're unfamiliar with online auctions, they work like this: People with things to sell post them on the site. People with nothing better to do place bids on them. If you place the highest bid, you then get the honor of sending a cashier's check or money order to a total stranger, who may or may not respond to your overture.

But what was I going to buy? Perhaps a new car? Admittedly, $20 might seem a bit short for that, but if I could find a really good bargain?

Sure enough, I found a 1981 Cadillac listed with a starting bid of $5. OK, so it was missing a few extras, like doors, a rear-view mirror, and an engine, but maybe I could find those items for the remaining $15.

Before I could make my bid, however, I had to register with iBroke. At the registration page, I obediently filled in all of the requested information, including my annual income, credit history, divorce rating, and the regularity of my menstrual periods (as a man, I'm never totally sure how to answer that one). Then, with one accidental click of the mouse, I opened up the largest, longest, and most overwhelming text-only Web page I have ever seen--iBroke's privacy statement.

Actually, it wasn't so much a statement as an epic--the sort of thing Tolstoy would have written if he had been a lawyer.

It began with the sentence, "iBroke recognizes and respects your right to your own private information, and we do everything in our power to make sure that right is respected insofar as we can recognize and respect that right while keeping in mind that iBroke is a commercial institution that must gather information about your buying habits and other little personal quirks which we collect only to use in aggregate or to enhance your iBroke experience which would be horrifyingly complex and boring if we did not have access to your personal information which we will share with no one else except our publicly and privately acknowledged business partners who may also require your said information in order to enhance their own and their clients' Internet experiences."

Translation: "iBroke promises to sell your personal information to anyone who asks."

The Bids and the Bitter

All registered and ready to go, I went back to the Cadillac, prepared to make a generous, sure-to-cinch-it bid of $5.06. But by the time I got there, the current highest bid was $17.

I was considering going as high as $17.07 when I noticed something I had missed before. "The buyer pays all shipping charges from Madagascar to USA, by way of Sweden. All shipping must be by airmail." Maybe I'd just buy a car at the 7-11.

So what should I bid on? Perhaps a video? I checked the movie section and saw some interesting offerings.

"Henry V" for $5.00, "42nd Street" for $4.20, "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" for 77 cents. Then I noticed "Showgirls" up for $53.79. I thought the price was a little high until I examined the offer a little closer. It wasn't a video; MGM/UA was auctioning off the actual master print of the movie.

Figuring that a video wasn't what I wanted, I decided to take up collecting. But collecting what? Grecian pottery? Chinese prints? Angry creditors?

Then I found it--my new hobby. There were people on iBroke selling ancient CPUs, some even dating back to the 1980s. And the prices were cheap. I found an early, 8Mhz 286 being offered for only $1.50 (plus the usual $3.98 shipping fee). I made a bid for $1.75 and went on looking.

As dawn was breaking, I shut down my computer and prepared to go to work, saturated with a warm glow of satisfaction. I had bid on five antique CPUs, enough to start the collection of a lifetime.

Over the course of the next few days, I received regular e-mail notices telling me of other people's bids that were greater than mine. I couldn't believe some of them. For instance, some idiot had made an offer of $10.25 for that 286. Why on earth would anyone be willing to bid so much for an absolutely useless piece of silicon? I immediately upped my bid to $11.75.

In the end, I didn't get the 286. But I did get a 16Mhz 386, an 80186, and a Pentium guaranteed to incorrectly divide 5,505,001 by 294,911. Altogether, I promised to pay $123.69 for the products and shipping charges. I immediately ran to my bank, bought three money orders, and sent them to the people who placed these valuables up for sale: D. Ceat, Connie Game, and Wolf N. Sheepsclothing.

Then I went home, entered my new purchases into Quicksand and let out a sigh of relief. Things were back to normal; I was in the red again.

Lincoln Spector has written about the absurdities of computing life since the invention of the abacus.