Naughty kids lose gifts to eBay

[GreenBat]

Naughty kids lose gifts to eBay

09:12 AM CST on Friday, December 24, 2004

Associated Press

HOUSTON - The father of three children went from playing Santa Claus to playing the Grinch after he determined his children were being naughty instead of nice, and taught them a lesson on by auctioning their presents on eBay.

And they'd better watch out -- the tree may come down, too.

A Pasadena information technology specialist decided to auction the presents because the youngsters, ages 9, 11, and 15, had misbehaved.

"One thing we teach around this house," said the man, who asked the Houston Chronicle not to reveal his name, "is that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people."

"BAD CHILDREN get no Nintendo DS. Santa will skip our house this year," the man announced in his eBay posting to sell three DS systems with PictoChat and Metroid. Also offered were three games for use with the system. "No kidding. Three undeserving boys have crossed the line. Tonight we sat down and showed them what they WILL NOT get for Christmas this year. I'll be taking the tree down tomorrow."

Thursday night, the auction wound down with bidding at $465.01 -- below the price the man had set.

"If you don't buy them, we'll return them to the store," the seller known online as magumbo--2000 reported on the site.

The man refused to divulge his reserve price, saying late Thursday that he would probably list the items again.

"These are normally really good kids," he said. But in a single day, he added, the boys fought one another, used vulgar language and gestured obscenely.

The man blamed at least part of the family discord on being lax.

"It seems like we'd say what we were going to do, then bend and back off a little," the 41-year-old father said. "We'd ground them for a week, but they'd really be grounded for three days; we'd take away video games, but they would still watch television. It decayed to the point that groundings don't work, putting them in their room, timeouts don't have any effect."

The man and his wife announced the possible punishment in a family meeting earlier this week.

"We told them to think about what kind of brothers they were being, how they were treating their parents and what kind of men they were going to grow up to become," he said. "We told them they were destroying each other and the calm and peace in the household. It had to stop."

The boys pledged to be nice, but were back to their old ways the next morning.

The next evening, a second family meeting was held to announce that about $700 in video games would be sold on the computer auction site. The oldest boy, the man said, responded with a challenge to carry out the threat.

The father said his wife has been in tears since the final showdown. "I don't do it outwardly," he said, "but I'm crying on the inside."

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[Pierow 2]

Hip-hip hooray. The guy is my hero.