EBAFFLED

Following on from my last post. Yesterday, I received a message 
from Ebay with apparantly-good news:

  Thanks again for reporting the listing(s) you found. We wanted to
  let you know that we closed your report for the below referenced
  listing(s). These listings have not been removed.

  [With the listing I'd appealed the removal of listed below]

Well it's a bit weird, my "appeal" has become a "report", which 
makes it sound like I'd reported myself for a voilation in the 
first place. But I'm getting used to really weird uses of English 
these days so the final statement "These listings have not been 
removed" sounded good enough.

Only it was wrong! If I go to the listing link, it still returns 
their 404 page "We looked everywhere!", and when logged in it still 
shows as being hidden as a "listing with issues", with the option 
to "appeal" still greyed out since my first appeal/"report".

So it seems I've got the old beaurocratic "Bugger off!" after only 
my first complaint to them. Yet they're preventing themselves from 
making ~$40 in fees if they'd just let the transaction go ahead on 
Ebay, when I never suggested anything different anyway. It's 
basically costing them $40 just to piss me off for no reason.

But the message does at least admit to coming from the kind of 
intellect I suspected was behind this complete insanity:

  This determination was made using automation or artificial
  intelligence.

I have an image in my mind now of going to Ebay HQ in the USA just 
to find all the doors locked, and peeking through the dusty windows 
to see endless rows of abandoned office cubicles, the only life 
being the lights flashing from long rows of server racks hastily 
installed in the corner of the room. Of course it's probably really 
all in some anonymous datacentre, costing a fortune for a net 
result that's barely distinguishable from cats walking over the old 
human staff's keyboards. Meanwhile their main competitor, Amazon 
(which I refuse to even buy things from), is one of the companies 
actually running such datacentres and selling AI.

Of course like Ebay's old human staff, the AI still won't let 
anyone talk back.

  Please don't reply to this message. It was sent from an address
  that doesn't accept incoming email.

I've got to wonder how AI still took six days to respond to my 
appeal though. Is it really now not even any faster than an 
office full of over-worked humans, or just trying too hard to 
emulate them?

Anyway the case with the keyboard seems settled, albeit 
senselessly. Unless the buyer does contact me directly by email 
before the end of the week I think I'll give up and use it myself. 
Mind you the way things are looking with all this devolving 
technology and political/economic instability I'm increasingly 
tempted to make the most of society while it still functions and go 
off on a long break, driving around rural Australia spending my 
money before it all becomes worthless in the aftermath of the 
impending societal breakdown. But that's probably an overreaction.

 - The Free Thinker