but look how much i saved! (time gambling)

i might have fucked up…

…i guess time will tell, which is the ironic part.

i have a couple of high end watches – but i have almost as many BOOTLEG high end watches. i’ve bought a few, my boss nabbed me one, i even had another one i sold to a coworker (regrettably) ages ago. they’re usually in the low triple digits but look like they’re in the high fours to low fives. yeah, sue me – even the fake shit i buy is nice.

i’ve had mixed luck with them over the years. the first one, a rolex clone, seemed really nice and a watch dealer buddy needed his loop to tell it wasn’t legit. the immediate tell was the date would roll over at 10:47pm instead of midnight, and eventually stopped rolling over completely and just stayed on the 19th, not even letting you manually roll it past. so that doesn’t get worn as much.

my other two boot rolies have (so far) stayed mechanically sound, just the weight it a lot lighter than it should be. i’m not complaining – while i like a heavy watch, i like it to LOOK heavy (i.e. be pretty large sized) but actual lux brands tend to be smaller but weighty. that i don’t mind foregoing in the name of cost. i have bootleg cartier from the same place as the first rolls and it just died recently, but it’s quartz (i.e. battery) and i haven’t cracked it open yet to see how replaceable shit is.

so, the other day (i wasn’t sober) i had a facebook pop up ad for bootleg rolex watches at a price i hadn’t seen since i could get them “wholesale” from co-workers at dell – under $50. and they had all brands, including breitling. there’s one breitling i’ve always wanted, but it’s about an $8,000 watch. my boss sold one for $5k, and the buyer offered it to me at the same price, but i passed for obvious reasons. my watch guy then got one in he was selling for $4k, but offered it to me for $3k. i still passed, same reasons (i’m currently pretty broke).

but this ad had them for $46 – what a bargain!

so, i put it through – for some reason it goes through twice and INSTANTLY gets flagged by apple card. my guess, at the time, was because it tried to go through twice? i replied to one of the flagged transactions that it was good, still had to resubmit everything, and this was a flash drop, so a time was constantly running. the final (and only locked down transaction) landed when there was less then ten seconds on the time. i felt i’d done well.

i paid an extra ten bucks to bump up to priority fedex shipping, but when i found my shipping notice in my spam folder (red flag number three? or would it be two?) and it gave a china post tracking number. it took me a couple days to find it, but once i did everything was in mandarin except it implied that in less than a day it had made it from china to lockhart, which is a logistical impossibility.

the tracking link that had been sent didn’t work, but since i saw it was “china post” and i had stuff through them before, i just googled “china post tracking” to get the info. i tried it in three or four of the different links as they popped up, all with the same weird instant “china to lockhart” part. said it was at our sorting facility. oddly enough, the bar-b-que capital of texas, with less than fifteen thousand people, has many modern conveniences, but a china post sorting facility AIN’T one of em.

buried in the links of the google search was a subreddit about fake china post tracking numbers that still (kinda) tracked so it was harder for you to file for a credit card refund because it showed package movement, but the guy was in the same boat as me, just the euro version – small town in spain, no china post sorting in his village either, but the tracking number said it was. and mine didn’t move for days.

so, earlier today, i went back out to my links and plugged in the tracking number, this time to specifically get screen shots to do this bit AND file for a refund, and now all of a sudden there’s more movement, saying it’s still in china and had never left but NOW had cleared customs and was on a plane out of shanghai as of this evening.

but half the links don’t show that additional movement. that being said, these are all third party so maybe they’re just not updating. i guess this is a more developing bit than i gave it credit for.

we gonna let it ride and see where it takes us!

(update – the next morning i got an email about the transaction i never said was authorized asking me to go rule on it in the apple card app but i still haven’t)