Bidding war

Today I bought something on ebay. It was quite exciting. Those of you who have bought anything on ebay can relate. I had put in a bid a week ago and for the longest time I was the only bidder. Until yesterday. So the game is to wait as long as you can but time your final bid so that your competitor(s) don't have time to go above your bid. Well, it was all accidental but it worked out. Accidental because I waited until the 5 minutes before the close after watching it go up again with ten minutes to go. Someone once told me that it was smart to bid a dollar or a penny above what you want to pay. That's basically what I did and I won by that $1.01. But it was accidental because 5 minutes before the end my connection decided to die (I have wireless and it's not always reliable--it's fast but less consistent than a land line connection). So I had to frantically reconnect, punch in all my pass codes before I could go back to my bid page. That only left about 2 minutes which actually made it perfect because the other bidder had no time to meet my highest bid (I watched them bid 3 more times to try to catch me in the final seconds).