Here I sit in my tiny cramped apartment, all around me the clutter of fast food wrappers and unread mail, a stack of unwashed dishes in the sink. I stare intently at my monitor refreshing the screen every few minutes, then every few seconds as time runs out. In the last month I have probably spent $800.00 plus feeding my addiction and it all began when I dropped my PDA at work…

Do you have any nervous habits? I have a few from frenetically bouncing my leg when I am sitting somewhere, usually completely unaware that I am doing it, to spinning my PDA in my hand, held precariously between thumb and forefinger as I flick my wrist to spin it round. Now if you drop your PDA and it isn’t hurled with much force it is usually undamaged when you pick it up and examine it, but when you fling it absentmindedly across a room and it hits a hard floor on its corner it will possibly break...somewhere. On my beloved Visor it was the LCD that cracked causing a dark stain to obscure about 25% of the 2x2 inch viewing area. I was as shattered as the diminutive screen. So I resolved not only to get a replacement, but to upgrade to a color Visor (I bought several modules for it, what do you want?).

Well, you just can’t get them from Handspring anymore and even if they DID have one they are $169.00 for a refurbished unit. So I decided to look around the net...and found eBay. It all started when I bid on, and won a Visor Prism for $99.00 - $70.00 less than the refurbished one on Handspring’s site. That was almost half the cost! Now that I have had a little time to reflect I remember How one of the women I dated so very long ago used to try to convince me that after buying some ridiculous amount of clothing and shoes that she had in some way managed to SAVE us money. I now think I know what she felt like.

I have bid on and won nearly a dozen broken PDAs and of the six that I have so far received I have fixed four units (two need entire screens and button boards). I look through all of the listings daily and usually place a bid or two and I am so afraid that I will win, but I want to just the same. I want them but I know that the credit card bill that I was paying down so religiously for the last five or so years is now climbing back up. I feel exhilarated and guilty at the same time, plus I feel some satisfaction when I piece together one good working unit out of the parts of several broken ones.

Not all of my credit card damage has been caused on eBay, I replaced an AV Tuner that was given to me by a friend (Hairboy) and a few other miscellaneous items like wireless headphones and a digital optical cable for the PS2. I am here tonight to tell you all that I am a tech junkie. I am a slave to gadgets. I need help.

And quickly.