Twelve weeks after I paid for a new driver and with my contact having disappeared off the face of the earth, I had had enough of waiting for him to call and tell me what the hell was going on. I was going to do some calling of my own. The options I had to chase him down boiled down to phoning the club he said that he belonged to, calling the police and getting them involved or phoning everybody in the phone book with his surname.

Phoning someone’s club is different from phoning a persons employer. Personal phone calls at work may be frowned on but they are not a source of embarrassment. If you are there 9-5 (at least!), 5 days a week, sometimes the only place to catch you is at work. Phone calls to someone’s golf club could be hugely embarrassing especially if they want to know the reason why you are trying to get in contact with their member. If there were a reasonable explanation for what was happening– no matter how less and less likely this was becoming – I did not want to be the cause of someone’s reputation being tarnished unfairly.

I wanted to keep phoning the cops as my last resort and anyway I figured that the phone book would be the easiest option, especially as I could use a website that gave the address and telephone number together, That way I could use Google maps to restrict the list of people who I would phone but starting with those that lived closed to the golf courses he mentioned. Typing in his name and town gave me 60 hits. Not a huge amount of people but I didn’t relish wasting that many peoples’ time hunting this guy down. Matching the most likely location for each brought it down to the slightly little more manageable number of 14.

I felt like a bad private eye in a cheap novel – obviously minus the trilby and trench coat and equally unfortunately without the busty blonde out front in reception, but with a steely eyed determination that this guy was not going to elude my grasp. So I sat down with the list and started phoning.

And then it happened…lucky number 13.

‘Hello can I speak to Victor.’

‘Oh I’m sorry he’s not in,’ the lady replied ‘can I ask who’s calling?’

Great, this tells me I’ve found someone with the same name. While it might not definitely be him, his unusual surname made it pretty likely.

‘It’s Martin from the golf club” – not strictly a lie as I didn’t say which golf club – ‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

‘Well he’s at football training so he won’t be back ‘til late.’

That sealed it. In one of our conversations he had said that he played football on a Thursday (a fact which I had completely forgotten) so this was his home number. Sounding as breezy as I could, I told her thanks and not to worry and that I would catch him some other time. If he’s out at football training then he can’t have fallen under a train or been in a horrendous accident and been unable to call me from his hospital bed.

So a couple of days later, I rang the number again.

‘Hello?’ This time a guy answered and I recognised the voice, it was Victor. Sam Spade eat your heart out!

‘Victor, it’s Martin from Golfwrx. How are you?’

There was a short pause. “I’m fine thanks”. His voice shook a little. He certainly wasn’t expecting me to call especially as he had never given me his home number. ‘Um…how did you get my number?’

‘There are 14 people with your surname in your area, and 12 of them are pissed at me for phoning them up trying to find you.’

‘Why? Did you not get the driver?’

Now this just pissed me off. I had paid him nearly 200 pounds for a club nearly 3 months ago and not received it. It had been a farce from the start and here he was, claiming innocence and wondering why I had phoned him up. If I was in his position, where there had been problems from the start I would have made sure to call and check, just as a matter of course.

It was kind of fun listening to him desperately flapping around when I asked him for a shipping number… at least for the first 5 minutes. After that I got bored. I decided to be nice and told him that he could email it to me tomorrow morning, making it pretty obvious that I was seriously annoyed and if he didn’t there would be ‘repercussions’ – I had no idea what this would be but more importantly, neither did he. Remember, I had his telephone number and also knew where he lived now. That he couldn’t find the shipping number didn’t surprise me in the slightest. On past performance he would be hard pressed to find his arse with both hands, a map, a bright torch and a tour guide.

The next day I spend most of the morning waiting for the email wondering if this time he would actually do what he said he would. His email eventually dropped into my inbox at about 5 minutes to midday. The problem was simple he cried! His mate at the shop had the wrong address for me all along, so if I send him my address again, it could all be sorted out!

Great! It was all just some cosmic misunderstanding due to the misalignment of Jupiter’s moons or some such rubbish but seriously, how could this happen? I’d texted and emailed my address numerous times and if his friend had the wrong address surely the club would have come back undelivered which would raise questions. You’d have to be some sort of moron to screw that up and not think ‘Maybe I should check this out?’. At that point I realised that I was dealing with someone who probably wore his underpants on his head and I wearily resent my address.

But if his friend at the shop was going to be sending the club, why hadn’t he told me this when he was scrabbling around for the shipping number? Surely he would have just told me then? Again, for the sake of the club, I was going to play along with what sounded like a bit of a fib and wait the 5 days that I had been told it would take. How much longer would 5 days seem after all this time?

A surprisingly long time as, of course, it didn’t turn up yet again. So I emailed him, yet again, to find out if I had anything more than a snowballs chance in hell of this thing actually turning up.

If there’s one thing you don’t joke about, it’s serious health problems. So when he told me that his old man had had a heart attack and that he was going away to see him for the next 10 days, I didn’t think that there was anything that I could say or do. At this point, I really didn’t believe him as I felt I had been lied to (or at least deliberately misled) so may times that I had no trust in him whatsoever but then again, it was only a golf club. Just some titanium and  carbon and not that big a deal in the great scheme of things, especially compared to a serious illness.

‘No probs’, I said. ‘Just let me know when you get back and we can pick this up then.’ I’m a softy when it comes to people being ill – a side-effect of working in a hospital for a large part of my twenties – but while I would treat this guy as if he was my best buddy until he knew that his Dad was going to be alright, I wasn’t going to go away.

So a couple more weeks pass and he emails me saying that his dad was fine and that he had an update from the shop. Apparently his friend had left the shop and the staff who now worked there had no idea where the club was and in fact thought that they had sold it. The irony when he described these guys as ‘muppets’ was almost too much, considering that his actions over the past 3 months made Bonzo the clown look like a hard working, dynamic, goal-orientated executive primed for the cut and thrust of the business world.

After much honking of his red nose and putting custard pies down his trousers, he finally decided that he too had had enough of the situation (and my phone calls and emails) and that it might be best for him to return my money.

About 10 days later, the money appeared in my account. Maybe it was guilt or just the interest earned in the prolonged period that my money had been in his account but the amount was slightly more than I had given him at the start. That the money was eventually returned to me on the first day of the month and was paid in as cash raised a few more questions about whether or not he had the money all the while he was promising to give it to me or had to wait for pay day but after all that had gone before, I just couldn’t find it in me to care. I had my money back.

Did I have any confidence that the money would be there if I hadn’t chased and harried him – no, not really. While,if you choose to believe him, he appeared to have gone through a tough time while this farce was going on with a serious illness in the family and a change of job.  I can’t imagine any situation where I would be happy to take hundreds of pounds from someone and at least keep them updated. How much effort does it take to make a phone call or write an email? Especially when you know that the other person has no way of getting in contact with you,  and you have enough time on your hands to go football training! The discrepancy on the shipping where he said that he had a shipping number, then said that his friend had sent it, then said that he had the wrong address, then that he hadn’t sent it and then no longer could all pointed towards a man who while probably wasn’t actively criminal certainly didn’t appear to be a bit of a dreamer/half-wit who wasn’t too bothered about keeping my money if I never managed to get hold of him again

So what did I learn from this? Dealing with private parties on the internet is always going to be fraught compared to dealing with companies but it shouldn’t be too problematic if you stick to a couple of rules: ‘only pay for things that actually exist’ and ‘if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is’. I will keep buying on the web, but in future I will be a lot more upfront and a lot more demanding about how I expect a transaction to be handled.

 *Names have been changed to protect the (maybe, just maybe) innocent.