It's swinging on you chair in the office and, since sitonMyFacebook.com(s) have been vetoed, eBay and YouTube are pretty much all there is left to fritter away the remainder of your lunch hour.

But eBay is an addictive game. See, I can go for months without even thinking about it, and then experience spates of craze, where I clock up tens of hits a day, sometimes tapping in ridiculous things – just to see if I may or may not want them.

Take last week. Last week was a shameful one. Last week, I was scouting for hanging chairs, Rod Stewart T-shirts, a harmonica holder and – and this is seriously in my search history – tent pegs. Tent pegs.

I am on-craze at the moment, so found myself coming home to find about 18,000 little packages on my bed. You know it's no longer a recreational thing when you genuinely can't remember what you've bought, what's in the packages, or why you even exchanged money for it in the first place.

And, an even more sobering moment is when you discover yourself setting an alarm to wake you in the middle of the night to get up to bid for stuff. I've done this. Twice, in fact. Both quite recently.

I kept my laptop on hibernate, set my alarm, woke up at 2.50am, and huddled over my computer to bid on these things that I didn't need, and barely wanted. And yet, at the time, it possesses.You know the score, you've got a budget of, say, £50. So you cunningly blow the opposition out of the water with a bid of £100.

You then find you're still outbid, and suddenly what was once a realistic bidding budget has since tripled in a fifth of a second. You either win – and then lick your bank balance wounds, or don't, and go back to your bed, deflated. Lose-lose situation we have, here.

But there's nothing quite as amazing as watching a grown person morph into a savage beast in the last seconds of an eBay countdown. You lose all cool as the pressure mounts and you prepare to whip out your eBay-bidding skills. Last second... Last second… Cue: swearing and perspiring and ferocious tapping and grrrr noises. It's a highly undignified experience.
And you know what it's like. You're sitting there, you tap in a bid, and then someone else bids above you with some pathetic 5p bid, that's barely worth the energy. So you whack in a higher bid. There they go again, with their 2ps or whatever. And you're screaming at your desktop: "You loser! Do you not have a life? Why are you still here? Get a job! Loser!" And then you lose patience and hope to blow out the opposition with your bid of extortion. See: paragraph eight and repeat steps.

Anyway, excuse me – that'll be the postman.