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If you are an expert in buying and selling on eBay, you don’t need to read this report from an absolute eBay beginner: me. Or, you might enjoy reading of my stumbles and fumbles.

Likewise, if you have not the slightest interest in ever exploring eBay, you may prefer a crossword puzzle or Sudoku thing, although eBay browsing is easier than both.

The presence of eBay is hard to ignore. This Internet-based phenomenon has sucked millions of people around the world into its maw, often for fun and/or profit.

How could it not, knowing that you can buy everything from an aardvark sculpture of hand-blown glass with 24k gold (when I checked it had no bidders with seven hours and 53 minutes until bids closed) to a Zulu tribal wooden mask, warrior-style or chief’s version?

I entered the world of eBay gingerly, having no idea how it worked. After a relatively easy registration procedure, I plunged in.

I was looking for some CD/DVD spindles, not the disks, just the plastic spindles. I tried eBay after striking out at several brick and mortar stores around here.

Wow, eBay was full of them, singles, six-packs, dozens of people out there selling CD spindles. The opening bid was for an amount less than the shipping cost.

As usual, I didn’t read the instructions on how to bid. “Well this seems easy enough,” I boasted to my bemused wife. “I’ll just bid a quarter more than the bid on the screen,” I said cockily. So I did.

Within one second, the eBay screen announced that I had just been outbid by a quarter.

I tried it again and again. (Wham!) Somebody out there with a trigger finger (Bam!), and a deeply held desire for those exact CD spindle cases was upping the ante another quarter. (Shazam!) I went up 50 cents. My nemesis did too. Another 50 cents and Jeesh, another raise by the now evil person hiding somewhere in the world, apparently determined to pay a thousand dollars if necessary to get what I now considered to be my spindles — dammit!

Frustrated, I paused and slowly realized that the odds were sky-high that another spindle seeker just happened to be on his frantic eBay spindle hunt at the exact moment I was there. So what was going on?

Was this some sort of eBay initiation ritual for me, the newbie? A cyber-space hazing ordeal?

At that point I saw a blue phrase on screen, “How to bid.” I clicked and sure enough, I had been doing it all wrong. There’s a system of maximum bids and if anybody bids less than the secret max bid, the eBay system automatically shows the next figure, the schmo (me) would have to bid to stay in the game until somebody exceeded the maximum somebody else already bid.

I was raising my own bid each time. There was no crazed spindle freak out there, no human at all. I was my own eBay enemy.

Chastened, I raised a maximum bid and got the spindles for approximately four dollars more than I needed to pay. But they’re on their way and that’s what counts.

This microcosm of an eBay effort doesn’t reflect the size and scope of this thing, this eBay, which was conceived by a French-born, Iranian computer programmer, Pierre Omidyar in California in 1995. In its present form, sellers pay a fee to list items and buyers bid on them. If they make a deal, it’s virtually private. There are guidelines and careful payment systems and buyers can critique frequent sellers, to avoid slicksters who don’t deliver the goods as advertised.

One special site is eBay Motor, where people can buy and sell vehicles such as vintage roadsters, RVs, sedans, pick-ups, jet skis and motorcycles, plus engines, lights, floor mats, mirrors and more.

Some people make a living selling stuff on eBay. We have a friend who shops consignment shops, charity second-hand stores and elsewhere for “vintage” clothing, then sells the goods on eBay. She makes a handy profit.

Another Marco friend bought a high-end, almost new car on eBay. The purchase was a smooth and as trouble-free as the ride.

Thus eBay is part garage sale, part closeout and seconds, plus a large chunk of antique and nostalgia stuff, souvenirs and masses of new, shiny merchandise.

I did a search for “Marco Island souvenirs” but found only four items, including a nifty ashtray, china I think, with a Marco logo in the middle. Other Marco items were a little collectible spoons, a thimble and a Snook Inn patch.

I searched for a golf course to buy and came up with a couple of portable ones – really, 18-hole mini courses with component parts that fit on a tractor-trailer rig, ready for assembly. The bid when I looked was $2,100.

“Golf courses” also produced several home sites and condos for sale on golf courses but no big courses.

My search for antique corvettes and roller coasters came up with a metal “garage sign” of a red “Vette” parked in front of an old roller coaster. What are the odds?

I once knew a proctologist who collected antique proctological instruments, hideous things really. He had them mounted in shadowbox frames on his office walls.

Inspired, I checked to see whether eBay had any of those things for sale. A search for shadowbox frames turned up 114 possibilities. I also found 28 listings for antique medical instruments, but nothing particularly proctologic.

Still, in the early days of medicine it may have been hard for a layman to tell a proctoscope from a protractor.

Meantime, we’re in the good new days, where one can spend hours on eBay without buying a thing or end up with a condo in Idaho. And you never have to change out of your jammies to shop the world.

I’m just sayin’.

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Don’s email: don@donfarmer.com.