A Miracle At Ebay

Here is a sweet story for you: A man lists his Rolex for $9.95 on e-bay, and sells it for a whopping $66,100, and that too right before the holidays. This shall inspire many to dig through their junks and see if there is something that can make them at least enough money to ride through the holiday shopping.

A retired neurosurgeon, who just went by his first name Bob for this story, had purchased a Rolex Submariner dive watch at the Navy Exchange on Kwajalein Atoll in 1958, for his scuba diving. By the mid-1960s, he started to wear it rarely as his diving slowed down, but in the 1980s, he resurrected his scuba diving hobby and started using it regularly.

The watch served well through different periods of his life, but now in his nineties, Bob has overgrown its need since he is no more in scuba driving, and decided to sell it. When the watch was listed on e-bay, the savvy e-bayers realized this watch was no ordinary watch. It was a vintage Rolex Submariner dive watch; one of its kind once adorned the wrist of Sean Connery in one early Bond films.

When the bidding rose to $30,000, Bob could not believe his eyes, and only then he asked his son to do a research on the watch’s significance and value, and then he found out the checkered history of this time keeping machine.

Although the watch was sold for a staggering price, the watch-enthusiast site Hodinkee.com thinks the true price of the watch could be much higher. When Hodinkee asked Bob if he had any regret selling this watch at this price after learning that it is a piece of history and worth much more, he replied, "None at all."

This was the first interesting angle of the story for me, Bob did not regret selling it cheap, why didn’t he? Is it because he is in his nineties? Does it mean that anyone reaching the age of ninety suddenly loses attachment to money? Why do we all run after money in the first place?

Then, think of it what was the chance that the e-bayers would be discovering the worth of the watch in time to bid it so high? Contrary to people’s belief, e-bay does not always fetch the best price, many times items are not sold, because no body desiring it noticed in time.

I also deliberated on the thought, what is the real price of a thing, of any thing? Why does an item suddenly becomes precious when it is linked to history, or celebrity? Who buys these? For what? How trivial is the worth of money to these people?

In my host of thoughts, I also considered the phenomenon that Deepak Chopra calls living in total connectedness with God when miracles happen as natural occurring events. Is this a miracle that just transpired, because Bob’s desire to sell the watch at a good price was connected to the source that people call God, and no one really understands what It Is?

By the way if in this picture a man resembles Christopher Reeve to you, you have good eyes, for he is Christopher Reeve, the Superman, who happens to be a friend of Bob.

Article first published as A Miracle At Ebay on Technorati.