The Ebay Way Of Life

Candid Jenna Jameson Porn Star Big Boobs DVD, $12.50. We don't know much about the person who won this auction, except that around the same time he paid $7.95 for an Abgymnic abdominal-trainer belt. He had a dream, clearly, and his merged with a million others, carried back and forth across the country and around the world in a torrent of binary digits: all the buyers who saw promise in broken VCRs, fulfillment in Wayne Gretzky autographs, riches in a pound of unsorted Lincoln-head pennies that just might contain the rare 1909S-VDB. You could see Omidyar's vision taking shape, a world in which every single object has, through the miracle of technology, found its way to the person who values it the most. As the young man (we presume) was looking forward to getting to know Jenna Jameson, a 27-year-old woman in Maryland was watching the bidding on a dress she had hoped to wear to her wedding in August. It was a new ivory-colored princess silhouette in size 12, and she had fallen in love with it and bid it up to $355. Unfortunately, she did this without checking the fit, and after tracking down the same model at a store she'd discovered that in wedding-dress sizes, she was something more than a 12. So she was watching the screen in the hopes that someone would come along at the last minute and offer more.

No one did, though. and therein lies the final lesson of a day spent on eBay, that you can almost always find what you're looking for, but it isn't always what you want. No matter how powerful a mainframe you deploy, the algorithm for happiness is a secret no programmer can crack.

In a photo caption in "The eBay Way of Life (June 17), we misspelled

's name. We regret the errors.

WITH BRAD STONE IN SAN JOSE, JULIE SCELFO IN NEW YORK, KAREN BRESLAU IN SAN FRANCISCO AND STEVE TUTTLE IN WASHINGTON

© 2002