HYDRONICS YOUR BUSINESS
World’s most expensive gift card
BY JOHN BARBA CONTRIBUTING WRITER
was the A side?” No obvious answer? You have a winner! Remember singles? Those little 45 RPM records with
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the big hole in the middle (needed that little plastic adapter) and two songs for 99 cents? Usually the A side was the hit and the B side was filler. They wouldn’t waste a potential hit on a B side. But in 1967, before Sgt. Peppercame out, the Beatles
released the ultimate single, “Strawberry Fields Forever” on one side, and on the other, this classic, “Penny Lane.” So which one was the A side? I had my own little waltz down “Penny Lane” about a
week ago, and my tour guide was my good friend Jim Hilpipre. Jim, owner of Hilpipre Heating and Air Conditioning, Faribault, Minn., is one of my favorite people and among the best our industry has to offer. He’s talented, smart, witty and thoughtful. Our industry needs more like him. But right now, he’s a dead man walking. I want to, as
Marsellus Wallace might say, “go all medieval” on him. Give him the Terry Tate, office linebacker treatment. Because of Jim, I now own a $15 Home Depot gift card
that cost me $175 in cash and roughly 19 hours of my life I’ll never get back. It’s all Jim’s fault. Oh, he has a partner in this heinous act of larceny. Let me explain (It’ll be good practice for when I have
to make a formal statement to the authorities later). Jim came to the house to service my boiler and install a humidifier in the forced air portion of my hybrid system. Since my office is in my mechanical room (Where else would it be?), I was on hand to help out, take pictures and share in the good times. While Jim was working on the boiler, he kept sending
me to look for tools, sheet metal screws, tin snips, you name it. It was kinda like the old days when Dad would send me out to the truck to look for tools and other parts that I could never find, stuff that was, ironically, with him all the time. Amazing how often that would happen. The old man
must have been losing it, sending me out to look for stuff that he invariably had with him. All the hours I spent hunting through the back of the truck when I could have been in the house helping …. Anyway, it was interesting to watch Jim work. As I
hovered over his left shoulder, Jim took apart the boiler’s heat exchanger. As I hovered over his right shoulder, he scrubbed down the inside. I have an NTI Matrix, and the heat exchanger, after almost two full years of operation, was remarkably clean. I had just tripped over a hose for the fourth time,
causing Jim to spill another small pail of gook removed from the heat exchanger, when he uttered the following fateful words: “You ever heard of
Quibids.com?” My ears perked up,
f you were taking bids on the greatest pop/rock two- sided single of all time (kids, ask your parents), the acid test would have to be the question, “Which one
Me? I have a $15 Home Depot gift card. I paid 175 bucks for it. But if anyone asks, I’ll tell them it only cost me a penny.
just like a dog’s when he hears you offer a treat. “It’s a penny-auction website. You can get all kinds of stuff really, really cheap.” Dude, you had me at “Hello.” I went to the website and saw this amazing collection
of stuff being auctioned, literally, for pennies. There was an iPad at 75 cents, a set of walkie-talkies with a two-mile range at 36 cents, a waffle-maker at 14 cents. I done died and gone to heaven! “First you gotta register, and then you can bid on
anything you want,” Jim said innocently. “Start out with the small stuff to get comfortable with how it works; then you can bid on the bigger stuff.” So I registered, gave the site my credit card number and,
quick as a flash, had 100 “bids” credited to my account. “Everyone gets 100 bids to start,” Jim said. “Is that like a free introductory offer? You know, to get
new customers?” “Nope,” he said. They charge you $60 for it. It’s already
been billed to your credit card.” “So you have to pay for each bid?” “Yep,” said Jim, as he started to get back to work. “And every time someone bids, it bumps the price of the
item up one penny?” “Yep,” he said. He was holding a tape measure. Didn’t he
ask me to go find him one a half hour ago? “And every time I bid, it costs me 60 cents?” “Yep,” he said, picking up a pair of snips from his tool
bag. Odd, 20 minutes ago he sent me out to his van to look for those very snips. “So, say I want to bid on this Waterpik Ultra Dental
Water Jet, I pay 60 cents every time?” “Yep,” he said, putting down the snips and picking up a
four-way screwdriver. He had sent me out looking for that too. Here’s how Quibids works: They hold these “auctions,”
for just about anything you can think of. The bidding starts at one penny and you keep bidding against the clock and against other bidders. There’s a 15-second countdown (like “going, going, gone” in live auctions). If
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phc may 2011
www.phcnews.com
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