If I had to be a salesman, I would've starved to death by now

I joined Listia a few weeks ago. You've probably heard about it. I joined at Thoughts and Sox's prompting. It's a lot like ebay, except you deal in credits instead of cash. It looks like a nice way to get some free cards, but it does take a little work.

There are lots of ways to gain credits, but some ways I'm not interested in doing. For instance, I absolutely hate being a salesperson for ANYTHING. I find it repugnant -- why do you think there are no ads on this blog? So I'm probably not going to be too successful in that area, which is promoting Listia (you can tell by the half-assed job I'm doing right now).

Fortunately, there are easy ways to get credits, too. I haven't built up enough yet to acquire anything much. This Just Minors card of perpetual Class A Dodger prospect Austin Gallagher is my first and only acquisition so far through Listia. Gallagher has been in Class A ball for the Dodgers for FIVE years. Yeah. But he's improving, so he's got that going for him.

As for the card, it's about as ugly as a non-Panini card could be.

However, let's look at the back:

The shininess is obscuring the mojo-factor, but this card is numbered 60/100, baby!! It's the "gold edition."  Didn't you see that fancy gold stripe on the front? This isn't just ANY Just Minors card, commoners.

As for my other bidding, I've completely whiffed so far. Like ebay, anything worth having almost requires a full-time job. You've got to keep your eyes on the stuff you want, especially if there are other people after it -- and, frankly, I don't have time for that. I certainly don't have the patience for it. I didn't have the patience when I was using ebay.

Listia does have a proxy bidding system, which is both convenient and periodically annoying, and that can help you not spend every waking moment in front of a computer (between this, ebay, blogging and Twitter, I fear for a certain segment of a society).

So ... that's a fantastic sales pitch, ain't it?

I've actually done a lot better with listing auctions than anything. Through Listia, I'm in the process of getting rid of a lot of unwanted cards (throw-out mode is still operating!), which is terrific. I can see this being the major benefit of this site.

And you can get lots of credits through successful auctions, so there's hope for me yet.

But now is the point of the post where I'm supposed to invite you to join Listia and get a bunch of valuable credits for both you and myself. But I can't figure out how to do that and link you to the special "Night Owl Cards invites you to join Listia!!!!!" page. And, as you can tell, I pretty much don't care. It's my whole aversion to sales pitches again.

So, you know, join it if you like. You might like it.

...

Ah, geez, I just know someone at Listia is going to fire me.