Harold Williams "BagBowl" Cooney

Sunday, September 6th, 2026. Studio Uncle Fish, Irmo, South Carolina.

Buddy, another day looking for the optimistic is upon us. Should be good.

Studio Assessment

In a progressive future, there will be a link to a tour of the glass shop.

It’s gonna take a while for you to catch up on how things work around here. I’ve explained things and then deleted them multiple times, and so I’m kind of hesitant about investing heavily into the explanation of the process.

Every day, first thing: clean the shop and choose the destiny of objects made the day before.

This process is very self-illuminating, which feels good or bad depending.

eBay Charity Auctions

After cleaning the studio, the first order of business is national service. Read about my 100% donation eBay charity auctions program, benefiting food programs around the United States, by clicking here. Link to live auctions by clicking here.

On sundays, I photograph marbles for a week of charity auctions and get their listings scheduled on eBay. That needs to be done, and it takes a good while.

Also, I need to try and do anything that can increase the price of the marbles closing today. My promotional abilities are amazingly limited, lol. I will need to do what I can.

I work for some time to produce a new promotional video for these marble auctions to try and get the price up for today. That effort was successful ish, and I would have been happy about that except for the fact that eBay closed my account.

I got an email explaining that I was no longer welcome on eBay because I am a security risk. My heart sank, and my mind exploded.

I frantically looked around my account, trying to figure out what the problem could possibly be and was unable to discover anything. It isn’t easy to get a live human on the phone these days, but after some button pushing struggles, I was able to get a customer service agent from eBay on the phone.

Call Number One explained to me that my eBay account was connected to another eBay account and that this second account had been suspended, so my Zanfirico Hanks account has been suspended.

I do have a second eBay account! Okay, okay. In the desperate doubtful planning of my presumably short future, I opened up two ebay accounts at the same time.

I opened up Zanfirico Hanks, where I would sell stuff for charity, Zanfirico Harold, where I might sell stuff for myself.

I did begin selling marbles for charity on the Zanfirico Hanks account. I have sold more than a month of daily auctions on Zanfirico Hanks.

But I never used the Zanfirico Harold account. Multiple reasons. The most important thing was that I didn’t think eBay would work for my beadmaking and that I needed to instead focus entirely on Etsy. Nothing was ever listed or sold there.

Customer service call number one told me to log into Zanfirico Harold, make sure everything was good there, and then contact customer service again from that account.

So that’s exactly what I did. Customer service call number two told me that this second account was perfectly normal and was definitely no reason for an account suspension. I should log out of this account, log back into the original account that was suspended, and contact customer service again.

Customer service call number three was very traumatic, lol. I was told that an eBay investigation had illuminated me as a “security risk to the eBay community.” No amount of questioning would get the agent to reveal the reasoning or source behind this label. I was informed that they aren’t going to tell me the reasons that I was judged prohibitively suspicious because that would allow me to change my behavior and continue being a security risk undetected in the future. I was told in extremely certain terms that I was permanently and irrevocably banned from the platform for the rest of my life.

I spent a good long time with call number three, trying to understand the situation, and ahhh, eventually I did: I was fucked.

I basically lost it after hanging up from customer service call number three. My life business kind of suck because I’m a loser and things desperately need and needed to be reorganized for me I have any potential in the future. And I feel like I had done a good job for myself by setting up these charity auctions to rebuild my business around. And now that’s done. Because… I’m an undisclosable bad guy?

I used Gemini AI to help me find corporate email addresses within eBay that I might try and contact. I tried to reach the “high-risk fraud department.” But pretty quickly, it became clear that I was out of options.

In the third customer service call, the woman seemed fortified in her assertions that i’m a bad guy when I admitted to having lived in New Hampshire about twenty years ago. I began researching how to research my own email address history. I tried to discover if there were any old business emails that I might have done business with on eBay. Multiple emails i’ve used over the last twenty years, and I started trying to use each one of them to log into eBay. Sure enough, I was able to log into eBay from an email that I used for my previous charity fundraising program that I called Art Made Food in 2014.

From this third account, I made the fourth call to customer service. Perhaps my call history with them was the reason, but I lucked out and got on the phone with someone higher up in the suspensions department.

Long complicated conversation abbreviated: I owe eBay $40.11 from this account. This is the reason my account was suspended. My response was something on the lines of, “I WILL PAY YOU IMMEDIATELY.”

Unfortunately, eBay life is not that simple. I need to initiate the process to regain access to my ability to pay eBay’s collections agency by clicking an email link and then waite for three business days for my newly generated bill to arrive.

Once this bill arrives, perhaps Wednesday or Thursday, I can pay the balance due and then make a fourth call from that account to customer service. Once that account is clear, I can log back into the Zanfirico Hanks account, where my whole trauma originated, and initiated a process to get my account reinstated. This process will be either instantaneous or take several days depending on… I don’t know. It just depends.

So. My charity auction program is shut down, and the lid has been screwed tight. It is possible that I can get it going again, but it’s going to take at least three business days and forty bucks.

Sigh.

My primary concern is that multiple people had purchased or bid on auctions, and they are left in the lurch. I can’t pack and ship if I can’t get access to the account.

Etsy

Shop the Zanfirico Harold Etsy store by clicking here. You buy, I backpack.

I had such a difficult time with eBay that I didn’t have any chance to pay attention to my store where I make money to eat and live and whatnot.

Lampworking

In a progressive future, there will be a link to photograph history or plans or some shit.

What can I say? I’m an emotional creature. After my experience with eBay, not only was I unable to muster the energy to pay attention to my Etsy store, I didn’t do any lampworking either.

I drank kombucha and salked in the grocery store paking lot. Not the most mature reaction, but that’s what happened.

Conclusion

Buddy, I have the hardest time doing things that can possibly help me. Lol. I’m a mess, and that mess follows and grows on everything that I touch. Everyone’s life has a theme. That’s my theme. It’s not great.

In the best case scenario, when things are a mess, I get a chance to try again. With some continued luck, hopefully, that’s what happens with my eBay charity program.

I hope I get a chance to try again. The shit is important to me.