How to earn £12.43 on eBay for 40 hours work

FANCY earning a bit of cash on the side by flogging some of your old stuff on eBay? Here’s how to give yourself an incredibly badly paid full-time job.

Choose your wares

One man’s cassette of U2’s The Joshua Tree is another man’s treasure, as the old saying goes, so spend hours laboriously adding all of your old crap to eBay. None of it will sell for more than a penny, but at least you’ll feel like you’ve achieved something.

Take great photos

Invest in an expensive camera to take pictures of that jumper you bought in a charity shop in 2011, immediately negating any money you may make. Next, spend several hours trying to figure out how to rotate them 90 degrees before giving up and uploading them anyway.

Write needlessly long descriptions

Most eBay product descriptions give much more information than is necessary. Make it clear that you live in a smoke-free, pet-free, child-free, fun-free house and get incredibly detailed about how your copy of The Da Vinci Code is in excellent condition apart from a small stain on page 468 where you got too excited when reading it with a cup of coffee.

Check your page constantly

Want to waste masses of time you could spend doing something fun or productive? Spend hours every day checking your items for sale, agonising over whether that pair of grubby, well-worn trainers is ever going to creep above 99p.

Send it off

Now your useless piece of junk has sold for £1.57 it’s time to spend over that amount on a jiffy bag and some parcel tape to wrap it up securely. Waste further time by standing in the queue at the post office feeling miserable for half an hour. Congratulations: you are now a successful eBay seller.

 

 

'Epic fail' and five other phrases that are past their sell-by date

KEEPING up with the linguistic pace online is a minefield. If you want to look like you’re up to date with the latest tedious phrases, make sure you avoid these:

ROFL

It’s been a long time since anyone has rolled on the floor having any kind of fun, let alone laughing. If you’re the kind of person that still insists on popping a ROFL into a text you are not only insensitive to the fact that everyone is currently having a nightmare, but also woefully behind the times.

Spirit animal

We all have one irritating tit of a friend who has texted something like ‘OMG Jameela Jamil is totes my spirit animal’. Luckily for everyone that phrase is now deservedly past it. If they text it again, delete their number.

Because

Somewhere back before Trump and Brexit someone did something annoying with grammar in an attempt to be cute, and suddenly everyone was saying things like ‘I can’t come camping because weather’ or ‘I love Tom Hardy because sexual charisma’. Trump and Brexit are now done, just like this stupid way of talking.

Yass Queen

Sounds fine coming out of the mouth of a 1980s New York drag queen, but less cool now it’s so ubiquitous that your mum says it when you tell her you’ve received a modest pay rise. Leave it alone and return to something more easily manageable for someone like you, such as ‘Nice one’.

Epic fail

There’s something very 2006 about the phrase ‘epic fail’, which makes the user sound like a teenage boy who’s just discovered a video of people falling off of skateboards on this cool new thing called YouTube. Best left in the past, along with things also big back then like Britney’s career and the Wii.