I’m set in my ways when it comes to shopping. I like to go to a store, see how much the thing I want to buy costs, then get it or not depending on the fiscal limitations of the time.

This week, however, I bought something at auction on Trade Me (trademe.co.nz) and now I am a changed person.

For years my husband and I have talked about buying a thingie to put the television and the DVD and the stereo on. Proper grown ups probably already have one of these things but I’ve resisted on the grounds that I don’t even like having a television so paying money to put it on something goes against the grain.

Also the cost of these things is outrageous. Sure they have holes in the back to poke the ugly wires out of but still…How much should a hole set you back? The first “credenza” I liked the look of cost thousands of dollars. And that one didn’t even have holes. It took no time at all to consider how much I wasn’t going to buy that.

But here we are years later and I still hadn’t found anything. I came close, last week, to buying something so-so for just over $500 but the cost just stuck in my craw too fixedly for me to cough up.

Then I found something similarly so-so – also brand new - on a Trade Me auction. I discovered it just five hours before the auction closed and by sitting at my computer staring at the screen in case anyone else made a bid, which they didn’t, I soon became the owner of an all right version of the thing I don’t really want but which will hide a spaghetti junction of power cords for the princely sum of $87.

It’s not the most interesting way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but it sure as heck paid off. And I was feeling quite clever about it too until I read in the paper about a six-year-old boy trawling Trade Me looking for a Spider-Man costume.

You think I’d be used to being trumped by six-year-olds but I’m not.