Mistakes..... the word tends to make my skin crawl a bit. Mistakes are something we have to learn to live with, we don't like them, but unfortunately they happen.

Today brought us a particularly "fun" mistake. Well, fun for a customer of ours, not for us so much.

About 2 weeks ago we hired a new guy to help us list a VERY large collection that we picked up recently. I had personally already given it the once over and pulled out any and everything that could or should be labeled as "key". At least that's what I thought I'd done.

Combine that with the fact that this new guy actually "knows" comics. Thus he's not just looking at issue numbers and doing data entry for us, I mean, he is, but he actually knows what happened in the issues he's listing.

SO... between my combing through everything, and us using "one of us" to list the books, you'd think there would be NO WAY that we'd list a $100+ book for $2.5 right.... well, not exactly.

This morning I'm sitting at my desk, I see the "listing confirmed" emails rolling across my inbox and everything is going just peachy. Then something odd happens. Bad odd, not good odd. What was that you ask? Another email came through, this time a "sold" email, this is obviously usually a very good thing, as it means we are a successful company, and if enough of them come through every day we get to stay open.... But this one left a bad feeling immediately as it was a "sold" listing that had just been listed about 2 minutes earlier.

Let me tell you something about that. THAT NEVER HAPPENS! Well it does, if you list something VERY expensive for VERY little money, but it never happens other than in that scenario.

The particular item in question was a run of Flash books. I'm not going to claim to be a "flash expert" but I've seen all of the EP's of the show, and I know where all the "modern keys" are, at least I thought I did. I know the Impulse key, the reverse flash keys, the king shark key, the hunter zolomon key, ALL the keys, well except for one.

And in my defense, this issue wasn't really a "key" until the finale, so when I went through the collection the first time, the finale of the Flash hadn't aired yet, so this book WAS still a 2-5 dollar book, BUT NOT ANYMORE as I've learned today.

The issues in question were Flash #'s 132 - 141 I believe, they contain the first appearances of the "Black Flash" and are apparently trending anywhere from $100 - $200 for the set, and we let them go for the nice humble price of $24.99... for the set....total....yup... that happened.

Good news is, I'll never forget about these flash issues again, lol.

So this message also doubles as our PSA this week too I guess, people, comb your $1 bins for these books, they're hot like Hansel right now.

Seriously though, these are the kind of mistakes you don't mind making every once in a blue moon, as these are the types of mistakes that collector's live for. We've all been at the LCS while someone was telling us how he/she scooped some amazing key issue off of some dummy on eBay, and how awesome it was, and how they paid $2.5 for a $100 book, well... today, we were the dummy, and I'm sure we made someone's day, just not mine, lol.

So I guess the moral of the story is, look at our listings nonstop and wait for us to make a mistake, because I promise you we will, and you'll get to tell the "eBay dummy" story next time.

Until next time, clearly not as knowledgeable about comics as I thought I was....

-Jeff///ACC