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GP Diamante won off eBayHere is my personal story, the first bad eBay experience I have ever had. I checked out the seller by viewing their feedback comments. From the high rating and the comments recorded, the seller was an experienced pen person. While the seller was not able to properly identify the specific 75 model, and quite frankly, I could not either from the pictures in the auction page. I thought it was a GP deep grid pattern 75 from France. Take a look at the actual auction page itself where the pen was described as: "... the Outside or Casing is in excellent condition. This pen has a GP Parker Feather Clip (which is not seen in pictures). The feed and section on the inside have a few chew marks." I even asked questions which the seller added verbatim as additional information to his auction page. So far, so good. He seemed to be quite reputable and forthright. Even the eBay feedback looked good with only a few negative comments out of hundreds of positive comments. OK, so here is a picture of the pen from the auction.
It is very difficult to see any details from this picture posted with the auction. Even the close-up below which I took doesn't show much of a problem except around the cap tassie. As you can see from the above picture, this pen is a GP Diamante. The problem was in all the details, really ugly, gory details that you may see for yourself in pictures shown by following clicking here. (Please be patient while all the images are being loaded - 11 pictures for a total size of 148K.) Cosmetic
Functional
I politely notified the seller of all the defects which he failed to mention. Unfortunately, he would not take the pen back and refund my money. His defense was:
On #1, I guess I learned a lesson to be extra careful when sellers have very high eBay ratings. They move so much stuff they don't look at the merchandise carefully. This experience shows me they may not even look at their items. On #2, this obviously was an auction that was inaccurately described. That's being polite. On #3, my desire to return the pen stemmed only from the dissatisfaction to its condition. I sent the pen to Parker in the hopes of salvaging the nib. Even they could not extricate the nib from the section and returned the pen innards. Thankfully they were able to replace the bad clip that had chipped goldplating with a new one. In making this replacement, Parker Service also eliminated the gap between the cap tassie and the cap itself. In essence what I bought was simply the cap and barrel, after adding another $20 to get a new clip replacement. Lessons learned:
One final lesson learned. Ask the magic question "Is the item functional as a fountain pen?" I failed to ask that.
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