It’s Ok To Tell A Lie When You’re Doing The Right Thing / Story Of A Refund From Ebay For A Listing That States No Returns

You shouldn’t lie.

Dishonesty ruins trust and destroys relationships. However there are times when it’s acceptable. If concealing the truth will save the life of someone you care for example, would you hesitate?

To fully understand what I mean, I need to narrate a story which may look irrelevant to you but is necessary.

Some background information

Recently, I’ve been getting into video editing and trying to launch a Youtube channel. I have a Lenovo Yoga 530 laptop with a Ryzen 7 processor, 20Gb memory and a 250Gb SDD running Windows 10. I had to edit around 100 short 4K video clips which would amount to 10 mins of playtime but this was difficult to customise in Adobe Premiere Pro as the playback was choppy and it took 7hrs to export, forcing me to leave my laptop on overnight for the rendering to finish.

After looking into the bottleneck, I realise my laptop (although powerful enough for other things that I use on a day to day basis like Visual Studio 2019/Microsoft Teams) was not beefy enough for video editing due to inadequate GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). The onboard AMD Radeon™ RX Vega 10 graphics card is not suitable for this purpose.

Standard laptops are not meant for video editing but a new PC to help me with this would cost in excess of £1,200; something I didn’t want to do as my laptop was only a couple years’ old. Fortunately enough, I found a hack on Youtube which would allow me to have an external GPU on my current laptop at a fraction of the cost (around £300).

So I ordered a PCI-E EXP GDC Video Card Docking Station from AliExpress for £40 as it was not available in the UK and that arrived in just 2 weeks, got myself a brand new 500W PSU from Amazon for another £40 and started looking into getting a decent graphics card to buy.

How I ended up buying on ebay from an international seller

Due to the Covid situation and prolonged lockdown, a lot of people have gotten into gaming which meant graphics cards were selling like crazy. I’m not a gamer myself and didn’t realise how bad the situation was until I started looking for a graphics card. They were sold out everywhere, Currys/PC World, Ebuyer and the other 20 other websites where I checked. Prices were inflated as a result of the high demand but I still couldn’t get hold of anything due to inadequate stock.

After much time spent researching this, I finally made a decision to get one that was currently available and looked reliable as well. It was a used 3 year old graphics card which would cost £200 from an international seller in Europe.

Accepting my own mistakes

Delivered through DHL for an additional fee of £20, I got the graphics card in 2 days. I hurried to connect everything together and it took me 4hrs to sort out all the issues with the BIOS and drivers only to find out it wouldn’t work with Adobe Premiere Pro. Although I’m a Software Developer by profession, I still didn’t understand the jargon of the gaming industry and it turns out that Premiere Pro would use your GPU if you have Nvidia cards/Cuda cores but not AMD OpenCL/stream processors (something like that).

I only needed an external GPU for video editing and realised I had spent £280 in total for nothing. I was appalled!! I thought about returning the graphics card but the listing had “No Returns Accepted” in the description. It crossed my mind to make something up because ebay usually favours the buyer but my conscience wouldn’t let me.

Although I had done a lot of research before settling on that particular type of graphics card, there still was so much information to process and nowhere did I see any incompatibility of certain GPUs with Premiere Pro software. It was only when I started looking specifically for that information that I stumbled upon a subtle thread from a forum talking about it. No matter how you look at it though, it was my mistake and not the seller’s.

Hail to the unforeseen problems

I had to come to terms with my loss and tried to make the most of a bad situation. I decided to see how long it would take Adobe to now render my video hoping it would be a bit less than 7hrs although I wasn’t holding my breath. Fans were spinning like crazy as I had disabled my onboard graphics card and even though Adobe wasn’t using the GPU as intended, a small portion of the work was handed over from the CPU to the GPU. Surprisingly though, after around 30 mins, the screen froze and I wasn’t able to do anything. I waited for an hour after which I had to force a shut down. I tried again with a smaller video without any colour correction/effects and that resulted in the same thing.

I was now puzzled.

My unfit onboard card was able to handle this without any issues but a dedicated £200 one was struggling. I did several tests and even without using Adobe, my laptop would freeze after some time because of the graphics card. I did several restarts and eventually my external monitor stopped getting any input from the GPU.

To lie or not to lie

I was not very happy about this and I was wasting so much time for something that should just work. I could live with my mistake and I had already consoled myself about a £200 loss but that was assuming it was my fault. I was certain if I was to get ebay involved telling them the item was faulty, I would get my money back but the seller would lose out on the money he paid for shipping to me and to get the item collected as well (around £40 in total).

I gave a lot of thought to this and spent one restless night before making my decision. My thinking process was:

• Maybe the item works but not on my laptop in which case I should at least pay for the return
• Maybe the item is faulty to begin with, in which case I should just file a dispute with ebay and as a business, it’s for them to incur shipping costs

I honestly wanted to be fair but sometimes you can’t please everybody. I don’t mind losing money but I didn’t want to lose that much money especially if it wasn’t my fault.

I was so worried about causing financial loss to someone that I spoke with two of my friends about it although deep down I knew I was not to blame. Not that I would change my mind if they disagreed but just to show how much this was lingering on my mind.

As the listing said no returns, I needed to say it was faulty and stick to this to get my money back under The Consumer Rights Act 2015 which would unfortunately mean the seller would have to pay for return postage.

I couldn’t say it was working before, then it froze and then it stopped working as they would think I broke it. If I was to do another fresh install, it would probably work again but I did not have such leisure to test endlessly. The reality was the graphics card did not work as expected but proving this was going to be difficult. I opted for a white lie instead.

How things turned out in the end

I requested a return of the item from the seller and said it was not working. He obviously wasn’t having any of this and showed me a video of him testing it prior to shipping. He used a DVI cable to test while I use the HDMI port, so this was untested. He also just performed a simple test, not when you’re actually using the GPU for an extended period of time. His listing had 9 in stock when I ordered mine but he took it down claiming he had sold all of them within 3 days. Doubtful but possible.

After a week of back and forth before you can ask ebay to step in, I had probably spent another few hours on this. Many people don’t factor this in but if you multiply your employment hourly rate by how much time you spend dealing with things, you’ll find out sometimes you’re wasting more money trying to rectify things than if you would just let it go.

Funnily enough, on Facebook Marketplace I saw the same graphics card being sold for £130 when I paid £180 for mine excluding shipping. A rip-off maybe, but I suppose you can’t blame people for trying to make a quick profit when they can.

Despite the seller telling me he would not accept my return and had video proof it worked that he would use against me, ebay sided with me and he had to organise collection of his item from my place. During the whole time this was going on, I had not been rude to the seller, stated facts that would help when ebay intervened and did whatever checks he wanted me to do and cooperated fully. I also said I would provide any proofs that ebay needed to confirm it was not working on my end.

So even if it was listed as a no returns accepted item, if it doesn’t match the description, you will get your money back with ebay. That’s such a relief!

When is it ok to lie

I have written down this whole experience to illustrate a point. Some people don’t think twice before they lie, I am not one of them and you shouldn’t be either.

I did not make a decision on the whim. I thought about it in all its completeness, not just from my side but from the seller’s point of view as well. Many times we tend to be selfish in our decisions and that is wrong. You have to be compassionate towards others and this means sometimes accepting loss in whatever form it comes to you.

Just being able to think of someone else other than you is something to be proud of because nowadays it’s rare for people to worry about others, let alone strangers.

Lies should be avoided but there are times when you absolutely have to lie. Life is not easy, the society is not fair and luck is not for everyone. We don’t live in a perfect world and sometimes you have to make adjustments to get by.

If you find yourself in a situation where you have to tell a lie, you need to give it a lot of thought and look at the different outcomes, not just from your point of view but from anything/anyone that’s going to be affected by it and then whatever decision you make from that awareness, it will be your responsibility to carry on forever.

Not all lies are bad and some are justified as well especially when you’re doing the right thing. How do you know if it’s the right thing to do? This is a feeling that comes from within, even if everybody else thinks you’re wrong, you just have to trust your heart to guide you.

Sometimes we may be more compassionate towards others than to ourselves. Just because we do something that’s going to benefit us does not mean we’re being selfish; we have to learn to love ourselves too because our feelings and opinions matter.

In the end, when you’ve told a lie, it all comes down to whether you can live with your conscience afterwards.