Inside eBay, Part 6

The Perfect Store
by Adam Cohen

(Page 6 of 6)

Working on a clunky old computer, a gift to the studio from a local bank, Griffith joined the information age. As his passion for art redirected itself to computers, he found himself spending countless hours on Usenet newsgroups. Griffith had been on an extended hunt for an obscure type of memory chip when one of his newsgroup contacts e-mailed him that the chip was up for auction at that moment on an online auction site called AuctionWeb. Griffith went to the site and placed a bid. He won it for $10, and he was hooked. Living in one of the most picturesque towns in one of the most beautiful states in the union, Griffith spent much of the summer of 1996 on AuctionWeb bidding on computer parts.

When he was not scrolling through computer listings, Griffith was spending time on the Bulletin Board. He was by now fairly proficient at using AuctionWeb and was happy to answer the technical questions that were being posted. Griffith soon became a fixture on the boards: Uncle Griff, a friendly source of advice for new users. One day, another board poster asked him what he looked like. "I don't know what came over me, but I said, 'I'm wearing a lovely flower print dress and I just got through milking the cows,'" he says. "That's how it started about Uncle Griff actually being a crossdressing bachelor dairy farmer who liked to answer questions."

The legend of Uncle Griff grew quickly. On the Bulletin Board, Griffith referred to his AuctionWeb persona in the third-person: Uncle suggests you do this; Uncle would never do that. He also began to fill in ever more elaborate pieces of Uncle Griff 's biography. Uncle Griff lived with his mother, but she was not available to post. He had duct-taped her mouth shut and stuffed her in a closet.

AuctionWeb lifted Griffith's spirits for a while, but by the fall he was spiraling downward again. In mid-October he stayed in bed for two weeks and thought about ending his life. Griffith forced himself to begin therapy and started taking Prozac, a drug that he says "should be in the water supply." Just as he was snapping out of his depression, he got a phone call.

It was Jeff Skoll. He wanted to know why Uncle Griff had stopped posting on the boards. Griffith was stunned that his absence had been noticed at AuctionWeb headquarters. Skoll had an assignment for Griffith. AuctionWeb was receiving fifty to one hundred e-mails a day from users, and it had no customer-support staff. Skoll was prepared to pay Griffith to answer the e-mails on a regular basis, and to keep up his presence on the Bulletin Board. Griffith was up for it, but he wanted to make sure Skoll knew what he was getting into. Uncle Griff was, Griffith pointed out, an unusual persona. "Yeah, we love it," Skoll responded.

Griffith became AuctionWeb's second part-time employee, at a salary of $100 a month, and its first official customer-support person. Skoll asked Griffith to select an alias to use as his AuctionWeb identity. That way, he could keep being Uncle Griff on the Bulletin Board without having his postings carry over to his official duties. When Skoll called, Griffith was looking through a book about one of his favorite movies, Greed, an eight-hour-long silent film directed by Erich von Stroheim. He came across a photograph of the actress Dale Fuller, who played the mad Mexican housekeeper. For his official AuctionWeb work, Griffith told Skoll, he wanted to be known as Dale.

Griffith returned to AuctionWeb with his two identities, Uncle Griff on the boards, and [e-mail] to answer customersupport e-mail. Bulletin Board posters who knew both personas did not make the connection, and Griffith never let on. To help with the e-mail, Skoll sent Dale a Word document, much of it prepared by Omidyar, with suggested responses to frequently asked questions. In addition to handing out advice, Griffith spent a lot of time doing what Omidyar hated: stepping in and trying to resolve disputes. Griffith was amazed by how heated the controversies could get, and how seriously the participants took their online lives. He often got email from posters saying that because of disputes on the Bulletin Board they had cried all night, sometimes all week.

To the noncombatants, the disagreements generally seemed wildly overblown. At one point, Uncle Griff had to step in to defuse an argument between a buyer and a seller of baseball cards that had started in private e-mail and moved onto the Bulletin Board. The fighting escalated until both men were on the boards every night, "screaming" at each other in capital letters. Griffith tried to persuade posters that hostility was counterproductive. "If you've got a bidder who is not honoring their bid, the last thing you should do is send them a nasty e-mail telling them they're a terrible person," he advised. "It may make you feel better for the moment, but in the end it doesn't serve any purpose at all."

When all else failed, Uncle Griff used his offbeat personality to defuse tension. Once, when a flame war was raging between two users, he cut in and announced that he had just been in his attic and had found a trunk that had not been opened for years. It contained a lot of his mother's old clothing, and he asked everyone to try an item on. Uncle Griff offered one board poster a feather boa, another an elaborate hat, and he declared that he himself was putting on a pair of high heels. He made a point of handing off virtual clothing to both of the posters involved in the fight. "Some people would respond, 'Oh, Griff, you're so silly,' " he says. "But what it did was break up the dispute without referring directly to the dispute."

Not long after Griffith got his call from Skoll in Vermont, Patti Ruby got one of her own in Indiana. Ruby owned an Indianapolis antique store with her husband and worked on the side as a computer programmer. Like Griffith, she had come to AuctionWeb early, and had become a personality on the Bulletin Board. Aunt Patti, as Ruby called herself, was knowledgeable about computers and antiques, and willing to take the time to answer users' questions about either. Ruby became eBay's second "remote," as its employees outside of Silicon Valley came to be known. She started out part-time, but within two weeks of Skoll's call she quit her programming job and began working for AuctionWeb full-time. Skoll asked Ruby, as he had asked Griffith, to choose an AuctionWeb identity. She became [e-mail] and remained Aunt Patti on the boards, both personas that would become famous in AuctionWeb's early days.

Copyright © 2002 by Adam Cohen

About the Author

Adam Cohen is a senior writer for the Nation section of Time, where he covers law and politics. He has also written for Chicago Magazine, Chicago Tribune and The Harvard Law Review. He lives in New York.