"Fuk you, Fuk you, eBay," one user messages the board in giant, bolderized type, intentionally misspelling the expletive, perhaps hoping that eBay won't suspend him or her, or delete the message.

So what is eBay doing for us? Pursglove ticked off a list of new services that he said demonstrated eBay's commitment to average users.

"There are all sorts of services that we've developed for our users over the years to make it much easier for them to sell their items," said Pursglove. "We have a shipping arrangement through iShip, photo hosting services are now available through iPix. We've created a Billpoint credit card service so that when you list your item on eBay, you can literally pay for it within minutes of it being closed down. So you don't have to wait three or four days to have a check sent to you, another three or four days to have that check clear, and another three or four days to have the item ship. So there are a ton of those services that we continue to offer to our sellers and buyers that are helping the average, everyday user on eBay sell their own merchandise, whether they are a person that might sell five or six items a month, or whether they're selling a hundred or five hundred items a month."

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For some of us, however, instead of photo hosting services, we'd just like the system to work. The Auction Guild, the Lone Gunman of the online auction world, determinedly monitors and documents it each time eBay bogs, crashes or throws repeated error messages, sometimes even catching the company in lies about its downtime. "The worst problems have been from the third to the 25th of October," the guild's Rosalinda Baldwin tells me. Sure enough, a few keystrokes and I'm looking at incident reports of major outages and problems on Oct. 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20 and 22, many of which were not fully or, according to the guild, honestly, reported by eBay on its announcements page.

Pursglove disputed some of the Auction Guild's reports, noting that some of the outside monitoring services may inaccurately record "intermittent problems" as major outages. He stated that there hadn't been an outage longer than two hours in more than a year.

But on Tuesday, after eBay admitted that it was having difficulties, its shares fell $5.50 to $54.06. They had already been dropping in the wake of the Oct. 10-12 outages. The shares were temporarily juiced up by the company's third-quarter earnings release on Oct. 19, but have already relinquished what ground they gained. Given that eBay's normal routine is to release earnings reports on the 25th of the month after the quarter ends, this glowing news, presented early, sounds suspiciously like an attempt to divert attention from known problems.

Like a lot of sellers, eBay's stock is not of prime importance to me. What hurts me are the 33 out of 50 of my auctions that closed without a single bid last week. Of the 17 items that sold, only three rose above their paltry opening prices. I have less than $100 gross income to show for a 60-hour workweek.

What all of these problems boil down to is more uncertainty and more competition for individual, full-time eBay sellers, the dogged loyalists who helped build eBay up from an auction board for Pez dispensers.

Thursday, there was a court hearing. My mother and I are being evicted because we can't pay the rent. I know this sounds melodramatic, but unfortunately, it's true. Earlier this week, eBay cut out when more than half the auctions we had running closed. Last-minute bidders, the most important kind, couldn't get in to place their bids. We lost money. A lot more than we made. It was a wake-up call.

I can't go on like this. I will not go on like this. I won't let my mother, her two dogs and my three cats, Raven, Sparrow and Magpie, who are my family, and depend on me to make certain their world is whole and sane, continue like this. It was a beautiful dream, but a stupendously arrogant one on my part. I fell under the giddy, deep drink of individual Internet commerce, and it has to stop.

It's a sure bet that eBay will continue to grow, continue to be profitable, to justify its rating as the Motley Fool's "favorite long-term stock of any valued under $20 billion." I can't tell you how relieved I am, however, what an enormous weight off my shoulders it is to finally admit I am done with it. This is one fool the online auction world will have to do without.

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