Pissed off with myself. It looks as if I have been scammed 3 times with goods bought from Facebook adverts. A graphics input tablet for £30 was delivered yesterday. It is little more than a kid's etch-a-sketch and certainly not the goods pictured and described. I will be pursuing through Paypal and Facebook. This prompted me to check the other two things I bought and it looks as though they are also dodgy. I also bought some 2TB memory sticks from eBay and they test out as 590MB*. So they are going to be refunded. If the vendor doesn't want to play fair then I will take it through the returns procedure.

*It is easy to spoof the capacity, because Windows reads it from the firmware in the device.

I found out that 'flog it and run' scams use tracked delivery services, so it is hard to argue you didn't get the goods - even if they sent you a pair of socks not an iPhone.

I feel that Amazon, eBay and AliExpress have a relatively good customer service. For their own commercial viability. they certainly want to protect the trust in their platform and refund readily in the case of faulty or mis-described goods. Facebook on the other hand don't seem to give a flying shite about anything.

Returning to the tales of mistranslation :- At school I had to learn and recite a classic French poem 'La Cigale et La Formi' (the Grasshopper and the Ant) and got one word wrong. Bite instead of Bise (Quand la bise fut venue - When winter came) Bite means cock (Le todger). Again the teacher laughed and wouldn't tell anyone why.