Comic Book Auction Part 3: The Bookening

So, after several 10 hour days & voluntary overtime in abundance, our 3rd Annual Comic Auction is uploaded to both Proxibid & Auctionzip Live. There are still a bunch of pictures that haven't been uploaded - due to the fact that I have probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 comics out of the 6,000+ in the auction that I still have yet to photograph, renumber, & upload. So that's what I've been working on all day.

Ran into my first couple of issues with Auctionzip Live today/over the past weekend. Nothing major, just some minor inconveniences - their tech support team (while very helpful) was not available over the weekend, and I wasn't sure I could change the location of the auction after I had published the lots & made the sale available for the public to register & leave bids. In Auctionzip Live, when you create an auction, you (like in any other online platform) have to select a location where the sale is being held. In their system, this is managed via a dropdown menu system of pre-programmed auction locations. This list, is generated by their in-house staff, so in order to add a new location, you have to send it to them via email. This leads me to infer that the majority of their clientele are auctionhouses with fixed locations, who don't do a lot of running & gunning with their sales. Unfortunately, my company does not fall into the "we have our own building" camp - we either hold our auctions online only (rarely), at our clients home (often), or we rent a facility for a weekend (also often) as is the case with Augusts comic auction. So, because I wasn't sure whether or not I could change the location post publish, and because I couldn't change the location manually, I had to wait until Monday morning to be able to change the location & publish the lots.

Lo and behold, once I had published, there were, well...phantom images that somehow crept into my photo upload. Now this one, I'm still trying to puzzle out. I literally have not a clue how these extra bonus images found their way into my photo upload. Here is what happened. I was uploading the images for day 2 of the auction. The contents of this sale are ONLY COMIC BOOKS & NOTHING ELSE. As such, their images are saved in a few folders on my work laptop, as well as on our office server. And there aren't a whole lot of pictures that aren't pertaining directly to the auction in those folders...I know because I had to look through each photo as I was renumbering them before uploading. I also know the folders were clear, because I had already uploaded both days photos to the auction listings on Proxibid. So, I ran the upload, carefully making sure as I did that I only uploaded photos that verified (there is a verification process that their java applet runs to ensure that the photos match by number to lots already posted in the auction listing). After verification, I uploaded them to day 2. Once this was done, I went in to select the cover photo for the auction. When you do this in Auctionzip Live, it shows you what I can only assume are all of the photos you just uploaded. Without numbers. So I'm looking through this list of photos, and its like this: comic, group of comics, comic, CGC comic, group of comics, gun, sword, comic, comic, group of comics, gun barrel, sword hilt...wait, what?

I look back through the folders - no pictures of guns, or swords. I call up the tech support line (they were both nice & helpful, but no idea what happened either) and we decide to pull the auction down & I'll just re-upload everything (and this time, make sure I don't add any gun or sword pictures).

We pull the auction down. I re-upload everything...checking EVERY FOLDER THAT I'M USING FOR SWORDS AND OR GUNS. After carefully checking everything, I'm confidant that there are in fact, no sword or gun photos being sent to their server, & I proceed with the photo upload. I go to select a cover lot, and...

PICTURES OF SWORDS AND GUNS IN ADDITION TO MY PICTURES OF SPIDER MAN. ARRGHH.

At this point, I'm baffled (and not a little bit frustrated). I know for a fact that I didn't upload any pictures of swords or guns. I know that they couldn't have been left up from before, because we completely pulled down the entire sale listing, & I recreated the entire auction listing from the beginning.

It can only be one thing...

GHOST PIRATES!

In all seriousness, its probably just some crazy crap left in my IE and Firefox cache memory from previous uploads to Auctionzip from our recent Civil War auction. Except we uploaded those files to Auctionzip, not to Auctionzip Live. Except that I cleared my cache. Except that I checked every picture before uploading it.

In summation, today my job apparently turned into the plot from an episode of Scooby Doo. Tomorrow I will find & unmask the ghost pirate who corrupted my upload...and he will turn out to be old man Jenkins, who just wanted people to leave his auction alone. Because there was actually buried treasure hidden in the server room.

MSPAINT: For when it's too early in the morning to do it right.
I'll bust out bigger guns when I'm not doing this for a lame Scooby Doo reference.