First off, I have NEVER left negative feedback for anybody. Having said that, I will say that I completely disagree with the above statement. Completely. A Moderator can correct me, if I'm wrong, here, and I'll totally accept that, but I don't recall ever seeing that rule anywhere. Is it a good idea? Sure. Do I have to do it? Nope. I'm a big boy, and I can tell when something hasn't gone the way it should.
As to my statement in the OP of this thread-- The situation is resolved. Everybody got the knife they were trading for. The circumstances, briefly, were as follows.
Another member (who said he had recently been on the wrong end of a bad deal) and I agreed to trade knives. He wanted me to ship first, I didn't want to do it that way, said so, and was content to move on. He then agreed to ship same day-the following day. After lunch, I received a message "About to ship, we still good?" I said yes, and that I had just arrived at the Post Office. I sent tracking info a little while later. Was met with a number of questions about shipping location, where I was located, he wanted to see more of the receipt than the part where his tracking info was. Then, nothing. Silence. Ultimately he replied that he wouldn't be able to ship today, after all. He then added that he wouldn't be able to ship at all until Thursday, the day after my knife would arrive at his residence. I expressed my displeasure at this, and my thoughts that he had been manipulative in an effort to get his way, and then he quit responding.
So my OP here, was written a bit later, after I had time to mull this over a bit, and feel like I'd been taken. Not even sure I'd get a knife from this person, I vented here a bit. Purposefully not giving any detail, or responding to the several members who PM'd asking to know the person's name ("seriously, I won't tell anyone".) My venting here was born entirely out of frustration. Of course, I wasn't going to post feedback one way or the other until the transaction was completed.
I worked for many, many years in a profession that taught me that there are always at least two sides to every story. My experience also taught me that this is the case even when both parties are people of integrity, and that their two different takes on the same story will never be exactly the same. And typically, no one side is entirely correct. This is not skepticism, this is practical knowledge gleaned from decades on the job. I say this in order to recognize that the other gentleman's story will likely differ from mine a bit. He'll no doubt tell you that he had work complications, and that this situation was unavoidable. This all may be completely true. I have no way to say that it isn't.
In the end, he got his knife, I got mine. I still feel that the other party manipulated the transaction so that he would get what he wanted, exactly how he wanted, regardless of what he actually told me he would do. Nevertheless, I left no feedback at all, and will not.
