Part worn human!

Part worn human!

Published on 06/04/2012 10:03

A PRACTICAL joke landed Brighouse engineer Paul Pattinson in hot water with mighty online retailer ebay.

Describing Paul as ‘a part-worn human, in need of a good home’, the ebay notice sought bids for the 45-year-old employee at Flow Technology Ltd.

Within days hundreds of people had viewed the item and more than 35 had put in bids, the highest being for £82. But on Tuesday ebay removed the item, only 24 hours before the bidding was due to close, because it breached the online company’s rules.

One of Paul’s colleagues, David Clark, decided to put his friend up for sale as a practical joke to see how many bids he would attract. Paul, it was said, ‘required exercising three times a day’ and his moving parts ‘needed oiling with Newcastle Brown’.

David said: “A few weeks ago I managed to sell one trainer on ebay after my dog decided to eat the other. I couldn’t believe it.

“That made us think that it might be possible to sell any old piece of tat so we decided to put Paul on the site and advertised him as a part-worn human.”

The item proved to be very popular and was soon attracting responses from Germany asking about international shipping.

In four days the item was viewed 765 times and was being watched by 35 bidders.

David said: “This is an incredible number for any item on ebay. We just couldn’t believe the interest it was getting. At first it was just people from work who were bidding but then it started going worldwide. “I had to switch my phone off because I was getting emails all day. It was then that we decided to change it into a fundraising effort for Overgate Hospice in Elland.

“We included a comment on the item saying that for ethical reasons people couldn’t actually buy Paul and that, providing the highest bidder was okay with it, we were going to donate the money to the hospice.”

Paul, who gave his full consent to the sale, said: “It is a shame that ebay decided to remove the item but we will make up whatever the highest bid was and donate the money to charity.”

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Top stories

News