If you look closely (click on the picture for a larger view), you may notice that it didn’t actually arrive in pristine condition. The box was clearly battered and crushed in transit, developing a big split up the side through which the contents could easily have fallen out.

Of course, parcels get squished and thrown about all the time. That’s why commercial PC retailers encase their systems in weapons-grade polystyrene before allowing them anywhere near a courier.

But when you buy on eBay, you leave the safe dispatch of your goods in the hands of an individual – an individual who may naively imagine that the kindly lady at the Post Office will ensure no harm comes to their lovingly-packaged item.

The breakable truth

As those of us who send and receive PC’s every day know, the sad reality is that even as you skip happily out the door, that kindly lady is handing your parcel to a lorry-driving wideboy to whom it is a matter of utter indifference whether your parcel arrives intact, or at all. Go ahead, write “FRAGILE” on the box – it’ll still just get chucked in the back of the van with all the other fragile boxes.

Maybe I’m being unfair. You get the service you pay for, and if we were really serious about things like “THIS WAY UP” and “DO NOT BEND” we’d pay for our packages to go by taxi. We don’t, for the same reason we take the tube ourselves.

But as I say, the man in the street probably doesn’t appreciate just how much protection a PC system needs if it’s to survive the ordeal of parcel post. And even if he does, he’s unlikely to have the right materials to hand. My seller conscientiously surrounded my PC in rolls and rolls of bubble-wrap, which did nothing whatsoever for the structural integrity of the box.

In the end, there’s no one really to blame for this: it’s just an unhappy disjoint between our (not unreasonable) expectations of parcel delivery, and the (not unreasonable) reality.

But it is, very clearly, just one more reason to keep your fingers firmly crossed when you buy from eBay.