The following is an update to the situation described here.
I was stalling on writing an updated post to this until it was entirely resolved but they are taking a while so I thought I would do a partial update.
Let me start by saying that the customer service I received the first two times could not be more unlike how this was handled this time. I don’t know whether this is a result of more awareness of this bug or simply if I got a nicer person, but I was pleasantly surprised with how eBay handled it.
On Friday (the day after I feel victim to the 14 old listings coming back from the dead), I got this email from support:
Thank you for writing to eBay in regard to the Turbo Lister issues you
have been having.I have gone ahead and forwarded your email to our Turbo Lister
specialists so they can investigate this situation. They will be
contacting you shortly.Thank you for using eBay for your online trading needs.
This first email made me slightly panic. It implies that the CS op didn’t even read my email and just skimmed for the word Turbo Lister and forwarded it. When I got this email I figured I would not ever see a refund for those 14 fees. I wrote back:
Turbo Lister cannot refund my fees. I will need you to refund the fees for
these 14 items, then we can work on fixing the issue.
Are you impressed with how nice I was? You should be, that is about as much self-control as I have. 
Much to my surprise, I got this email back a few hours later:
Thank you for writing eBay in regard to your credit request. I apologize
that your email was routed to Turbo Lister. They can however give you an
update on the status of the technical issue. I did issue you a credit
for these items.(Then some info on accessing my account to see the credit.)
Two small things strike me in this. #1 is that her email implies my question was incorrectly routed to TL which is only weird because she is the exact person who routed it there. #2 is that it’s refreshing this time that eBay not only refunded the fees but at least made a show of letting me talk to Turbo Lister about this. I am assuming this means that enough people have complained about this bug that they are finally working on it but even if it just means that they want me to tell them about what happened myself, it does make me feel better than the “I’ll let Turbo Lister know. . . NOT!” I experienced last time.
Of course, still no word from Turbo Lister support on this yet so it’s not a complete victory. But I did get my refund with a minimum of fuss which was really my main complaint as last time they told me I would not be refunded.
Something like this makes me feel like, no matter what they are doing on a large scale with the company, person to person, someone still wants to work with the sellers and make then succeed, even if it only is 1 person in the customer service department.
Hi Hillary,
Glad to see you got the refund–they gave me back $1.50 for one I accidentally launched w/subtitle from Inkfrog. Actually I probably wouldn’t have bothered contacting them if I hadn’t seen your post mentioning refunds. It was quick and easy.
What we’ve got to remember, when criticizing eBay’s Customer Service is that CS pretty much universally sucks (not that it shouldn’t be criticized, just that it goes much deeper than eBay). These are low level employees with a playbook they’re terrified to deviate from and so responses will sound canned and/or unhelpful. It’s always great to find someone a little more human than the drones, but this isn’t just eBay, it’s everywhere.
I’ve never been able to understand how one of the most important departments a company could have is the most understaffed/underpaid/etc. Especially today when you’re just one ticked off customer away from having a “YourCompanySucks.com” up somewhere!
My greatest desire from CS (anywhere) is that follow-up questions be handled by the same person throughout the lifetime of the issue. I hate repeating myself!
Thanks for the pair of TL posts, hopefully they roll out some kind of update soon which gets around your problem.
Thanks, Cliff
I have worked as a Live Chat operator myself (I did so for about a year and a half) and have been subject to all kinds of abuse.
My issue with eBay’s CS in the past has simply been their “deny everything” policy.