Another day, another dollar auction

A few weeks ago, a nice guy named Markus wrote me, asked me to check out his auction site. I didn't, mostly because I didn't get his email. Actually, I didn't get anybody's email because I was at the bottom of the Gulf of Thailand. Depending on who you talked to, I was either learning to scuba dive or "practicing to drown" (in the words of my instructor). Whichever, the only way you were going to get a message to me was to write in on a rock and drop it off the back of a boat.

When I eventually ran out of money and compressed air, I came back, found the original email and a second one offering me [a moderate reward] to run a review on the blog, and a third assuring me of his sincerity. I wrote back, told him I believed that he was sincere but that I was really busy (especially with all the things I'd let slide during my vacation). He wrote back bumping his offer to [a slightly less-moderate reward].

Now if I'd had the brains God gave chickpeas, I would have demanded [a completely unmoderate reward]. Instead I just wrote him back, told him I'd review his site and he could [reward me with] whatever he felt like.

Actually, now I've been to the site, it looks pretty good, so maybe I'll end up with [a reward of some sort].

[Update: Markus -- who, as I mentioned, is an extremely nice guy and who apparently lives in Cyprus for some reason -- wrote back and asked me remove the details of proposed reward. He was concerned it would look like link-farming. Suffice it to say, the reward was sufficiently moderate in its nature and scale, it would not have moved me to even link to his site, let alone go to the effort of reviewing it; it was just sufficient incentive to get me off my voluminous backside and do my job by tracking penny-auction sites. ]