Timewasters - Don't you just love them.

shame its not a Beta Saloon. I have a mega-jones for one of those. It would have to be in dark blue or I'd have to knock the price of a resray off it obviously...

A chap I knowish had a Model A hot rod for sale. Some chump came to see him and dsaid it was only worth a grand because it had a 4 pot in it not a V8. His arguement was "its a Pinto, you can pick pintos up for £50"

But yeah, seriously, I feel your pain

Hehe brilliant

I'm all up for a bit of haggling, and am not offended at all if someone offers me £500 for a car I want £1000 for, there's no harm asking. But when they start pointing out faults I've told them about, and priced it to suit.... like when I sold my Audi which was a damaged-repaired Cat D. Wanted £550, which is pretty reasonable for a 2.3 20v Sport with low mileage... chappie comes and looks around, drives it, goes away to 'have a think'. Rings me up the next day and offers me £250, as he's had it HPI'ed and it's a Cat D. So I read him the bit of the advert he responded to which said "Previously written off, photos available of damage, repaired and MoT'ed" and he persisted with it.... "Well, you can't ask full price for a writeoff can you?". FFS! It's be £800 without the blot, foooool! And it was only a broken taillight and steering column lock anyway.

Oh well, at least he showed up!

Whenever somone offers me a derisory amount for something I'm selling I just say "sorry mate I'm sure April fools has gone already this year!" Its best to be polite to all potential buyers as they could come back with a better offer but some take the wee!

phonecall on monday, gave directions, sorted a time, went straight home from work and sat around with the phone for an hour. and had to cut short seeing my mate to about 3 1/2 minutes to accomodate this. cheers.

Was offered £50 for my 306 TD on trade in once.

I'm sure if mcgee's around he can recount the tale of his 60,000 mile Xantia being for sale of £200 (was it £200? I can't remember) and some prat turning up offering £20 for it 'because it's got a scratch on the bumper and £20's all I came out with and I'm not going home and getting more.'

Someone offered me £15 for the Amazon 'because I want to race it'. Bell end.

Had a cracking example with the Stag - middle aged woman turned up, obviously was a complete timewaster just from the way she was standing pathetically by the car. Poked around it for about 15 minutes, mumbled for ages about the state of minor irrelevant trim, poked at tiny insignificant flaws, wondered around totally depressed - remember, I was asking 4500. Then went "Oh, it's not as nice as the one I owned"....

"How much did you sell it for?" I asked.....

"11,000" she replied...

I rest my case. If there's one thing I can't stand - it's people who expect ten grand cars for five grand money and act like complete morons when unsuprisingly it doesn't turn out to be the case - logical reasons for turning down a car I have no problem with but that takes the biscuit!

I took small consolation from the fact that when she originally sold her Stag, she used the money to set up a business that failed next year. Then, a few weeks later, I found the Stag she eventually bought was a totally shed and the transmission dropped out on the journey home. Well played.

Oh well, not a spiteful sort but it was some consolation

At least you got £50 out your tyre kicker LordYoung so fair play to ya.

OK, I've had some peaches.

I'm sure I've told these tales before but here goes....

A while ago, in the days before eBay, I had the ultimate timewaster magnet: A 1968 Plymouth Fury III which was painted army green with white stars stencilled on the doors etc.





Anyway, this car was a whole heap of trouble. It was leaky and boy was it rusty. And all the elctrics were shot, and the trans slipped. But it had a sweet V8 and the heavy duty back axle and a few other desirable things (TF727A trans etc)

So I put it up for sale as "for spares or brave restoration, very rotten, no T&T, ideal donor for hot rod or Cobra type kit car etc."

And a price of a few hundred quid.

So I get some drunk guy ring up at 11:15 one Friday evening, "can I come have a look at it now?"

I get some guy in London who wants to know if I will swap it for a Ginenta G15 which is all in bits and can I deliver/collect the G15...

At least three of 4 people for whom the phone conversation goes like this....

guy: Is the Fury still for sale?
me: yes.
guy: is that like the one in Christine?
me: no, its 10 years younger. Like it says in the ad, 1968.
guy: so whats it like?
Me: dog rough.
guy <laughs>
me: pretty rusty, body's full of filler, nice interior, mechancially good except theres a fault with the box, not sure what.
guy: will it need much for the MOT?
me: electrics sorting out, maybe some welding, dunno, trans sorting...

so then they come and look and say "its a bit rough isn't it?" and I say, yes. it is. dog rough. (what were you expecting when I said it was rough on the phone and am asking next to nothing for it? You think I was lying? Saying tis worse than it is to put buyers off? Or maybe you think I'm some kind of imeceile who sees rot where tis not? And then they go away.

I even said to one guy "its rotten, its a spares car or a banger racer really. The price is what the mechanical bits which still work are worth, I just can;t be bothered to break it myself...."

and he turned up and said "its a bit rough isn;t it?"

****** T W A T *******

I had two lads drive up from Bristol in a new Pug 106 or similar, take it on the worlds most worrying test drive (slipping trans, no T&T, no insurance probably, totally identifiable as my car as it was well known in the locale to be a point of refference on the Rotarian Club treasure hunt etc.) and then they went off to "think about it"

I was so fugged off with all this that when some bloke turned up in an American car (woo hoo) and offered me £100 for it I said "if you have the cash and take it away pronto, yes". He mumbled something about having to go to the cash point and I never saw him again.

In the end when people rang up I said "are you a scrap dealer or banger racer?" and if they said "No" I told them to sod off.

In the end I sold it to a mate of a mate for £450 the engine went in a '59 Plyumouth the seats went in an Impala and the tyres went on a CHrysler. The rest went to be weighed in.

THE END.


Then there was the couple who I picked up at the station, came and test drove my FD Estate for 2 hours, wasted my time for a whole morning doing a microscopic paint work check on it and then announced it was "too big". Well, its no bigger now than 4 hours ago when you arrived here you idiots. Nice people, really, they were nice, but dim.

I've owned about 50 cars. I have still got 5 of them. I must have had 5 timewasters for each car I sold on average. Therefore I have dealt with 225 timewasters I guess. Some worse than others.

I sold my MG on ebay for £2250, asked the guy for the deposit by Monday evening, he didn't send it so I phoned him every half an hour until Wednesday when I got curse word off and left a message saying '3pm today or you don't get it'. He phoned me at about 10pm saying he could send the deposit in the next couple of days, I told him to curse word off... then he gives me negative rep on ebay claiming that I refused to sell the car.

Then he refused to accept the 'mutually ended contract' thing on ebay, meaning I had to pay the final sale commission to ebay (I sent them the series of emails I had sent to him proving that it was his fault that I couldn't sell it to him, so I didn't have to pay it in the end...).

And as an act of final cheek, he threatened to send me his an invoice for his insurance cancellation fee. I wrote back saying 'I will happily pay the fee if you pay the difference between your winning bid and the next highest bid. Considering that it was entirely your fault that the transaction was not completed, and that you breached a legally binding contract, I expect that my endeavours to recover costs will be more fruitful than yours'. Strangely I never heard from him again. I have taken to sending him monthly letters asking for the costs, I know I'll never get anything but it's fun.

What kind of idiot insures a car before he's even paid the deposit anyway?

Another time I went all the way from York to Romford to see a Cortina 3. Apparently it was in useable nick, was used regularly by the same owner (who apparently wasn't a dealer) for about five years and hadn't been thrashed or crashed. When I got there, surprise surprise, what did I see, about eight cars crammed onto his driveway and front garden with 'For Sale signs on them... not a dealer... well maybe not a professional one.

I looked a the car and the whole front end was full of filler and was a different shade of rattle-can green, and the guy said he had been driving it regularly for about 5 years... well... I checked the paperwork and in the five years it had been sitting there, it hadn't had an MOT for three of them, and it had done about 200 miles... hardly regular use.

I watched the car on ebay and unsurprisingly, after it had been sold, a few days later it was relisted, this time with all the details listed correctly haha