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| February
10, 2001 |
| Man's
Soul Goes For A Mere $400 On eBay |
Seattle Times
SEATTLE
- "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
his own soul?" - Mark 8:36. And how will it affect your eBay feedback rating?
Adam Burtle of Woodinville, Wash., gained not the world but $400 in an auction
on the Internet site that ended at 4:36 p.m. Thursday.
Bidding for the
item, listed as "20 yr-old Seattle boy's SOUL, hardly used," began at 5 cents
Feb. 1. A bidding war for Burtle's soul broke out in the auction's final hour,
shooting its selling price from $56 up to $400.
"I was happy to be past
$7.50," said Burtle, an atheist, noting that an ex-girlfriend had bid $6.66 -
the number of the beast - for his soul.
But his soul's going, going, gone:
eBay officials removed the listing and suspended Burtle from the site. For eBay,
the issue seems not metaphysical but postal.
"You have to have a piece
of merchandise that a seller can deliver to a buyer," said eBay spokesman Kevin
Pursglove.
In the past, the San Jose, Calif.-based company has stopped
auctions for human souls before they ended, but Burtle's slipped through the cracks.
Pursglove said the company can't stop the two parties from carrying on any transaction
on their own at this point.
The buyer is a woman from Des Moines, Iowa.
It's unclear what kind of hands Burtle's soul has fallen into because she has
a feedback rating of 0 - meaning she has no track record of behavior with other
eBay users.
"I don't think she's going to be able to collect on my soul,
to be honest," Burtle said.
Burtle, a University of Washington student
and part-time automotive technician, was pictured in the auction listing wearing
an "I'm with stupid" T-shirt. And while no one may be able to vouch for his soul,
his one feedback on eBay is a glowing one: "Truly a man I would trust my daughter
with," said someone who bought a Bill Hicks comedy CD from him.
In the
eBay description for his soul, Burtle wrote: "Please realize, I make no warranties
as to the condition of the soul. As of now, it is near mint condition, with only
minor scratches.
"Due to difficulties involved with removing my soul, the
winning bidder will either have to settle for a night of yummy Thai food and cool
indie flicks, or wait until my natural death."
In the past, people have
tried to sell a liver and a kidney on eBay, a site with 22 million users and 6
million items up for bid at any given moment.
"People have tried to auction
off, as pranks, their virginity," said Laura Fisher Kaiser, co-author of "The
Official eBay Guide to Buying, Selling and Collecting Just About Anything."
The
list of prohibited items includes guns, body parts, drugs and alcohol.
"I
think what's funny about it is the idea that you can sell anything on eBay, and
people are constantly trying to push the limits on that, to see how big a dent
they can make in the cultural consciousness," Kaiser said.
For his part,
Burtle was less interested in the cultural consciousness than placing what he
said amounted to a clever personal ad not to be taken seriously.
"I was
just bored, and I'm a geek. So anytime I'm bored, I go back to my Internet."
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