I'm now a member of a tiny, exclusive community - people who know where eBay's UK headquarters are.

It's not too difficult to find this out using Google, but to save you the time they're in Richmond, in Surrey. Not only do I know this, I've joined the miniscule ranks of non-eBay employees who've spent more than a few seconds inside the building.

You won't find the address on eBay's website, and you won't find the eBay logo on the outside of the building either. It's tucked away in a serenely quiet Georgian square just off a main road, a square bordered by about eight different buildings. It's not until you get into the right buildiing that a tiny sign behind reception, below those for several other companies, acknowledges you've reached the home of eBay (UK).

I checked in and got my visitor's pass, then waited for a few minutes in the rather plush reception area. There are three or four low-slung, comfy blue armchairs around a transparent coffee table in what is otherwise a relatively uninspiring entrance for such a powerful company. The whole point of this building seems to emphasise the relative inconsequentiality of eBay's UK headquarters compared with the behemoth that is its big US brother. Indeed, the reason given for the lack of a UK address on eBay's site when I asked about it was that there's no one here to write to - no customer services, no one in any position of direct responsibility to eBay's users. It all goes to America, and by email if they can help it.

My spokesman came bounding down the stairs to greet me. I don't know what the image in your head of an eBay spokesman is, but he wasn't particularly like mine. He wasn't an overweight, suited and spectacled relic, nor was he some ultra-trendy 18 year old out to prove to the world how eBay's the hippiest, hoppiest happeningest piece of technology since spliced bread. He was just an ordinary bloke really, and a friendly one at that. We had a quick chat and his primary concern was not eBay, eBay, eBay, but whether he'd get soaked cycling home to Clapham afterwards.

Still, I'd had a fairly rotten day up til this point. Dr Mark Bauer, social psychologist at the London School of Economics, had abruptly and rudely hung up on me as I asked him for an interview; and Brenda, a member of Sutton Council's communications team (not press office, communications team, pompous bastards, it's only a local council) had told me I couldn't interview a couple of councillors at an anti-chewing gum press call tomorrow because they had a 'tight deadline' and it was 'for photographers only'. The press release about the event - 'Council tells Wrigley's to stick it', ho ho chortle - had said there'd be an hour set aside for the press call. That is not the tightest of deadlines. This involved the same councillor, Colin Hall, as refused point blank to talk to me in October, forcing me to rely on the (far kinder) Paddy Kane for my street cleaning piece. I am beginning to dislike him.

So the eBay guy got it in the neck once the interview started. What didn't help was his expertise at his job. He was incapable of answering a question in anything other than carefully couched eBay-approved terms, quoting facts and figures complimentary of eBay, riding roughshod over subtle changes of emphasis in my questioning designed to elicit a little more. The more I pushed, the more I got the same facts and figures back at me. So I became fairly adversarial in my approach, interrupting and really trying to drive home points. Once or twice I got what I was looking for, something a bit different to the usual party line, but it really was tough going.

Not that I can fault him for that, since it's his job - no company wants to employ a press officer given to memorable quotes and colourful language, they want a guy who can recite the same thing over and over until hostile journalists give up. After fifteen minutes we ended the interview and carried on debating things off-mic, fairly heatedly, for another ten minutes, then we switched the mic on again and recorded some of what we'd just said, since we both thought we were making decent points. That hasn't happened before, I've not been in an interview where both parties have been so wrapped up in the debate that neither cares if we're recording or not.

The room we did the interview in was very plush, with nice chairs, a big desk and most impressively a giant projector screen, which my spokesman used to surf eBay as we spoke. He talked us through eBay's 'football memorabilia' community, 109 members discussing all matters memorabilia-related, and then we looked at some memorabilia 'power sellers'. It turned out one of them was a memorabilia trader I'd spoken to just yesterday, who'd said he does 75% of his trading on eBay, and looking at his feedback rating (well into four figures) he wasn't wrong. Amusingly my spokesman took quite a while to find the football memorabilia community - if the eBay spokesman himself can't find it, chances are casual eBay users are unlikely to accidentally trip over it either.

It was, though, the decor of the room that said so much about public perceptions of the company. eBay has, for some reason, elected to name each of the rooms in its building after British icons of some description or another. For example, the first room I saw as we stepped into the first floor corridor had a sign on the door saying 'Big Ben'. I assumed this was one of those trendy Googlesque offices where mildly euphemistic nicknames were perfectly tolerable. Then I saw the one next to it was called 'Mini Cooper', and next to that 'Bond'. Each room had a glass facia onto which had been applied artwork depicting St Stephen's Tower, a Mini and 007 himself. I'm not sure why, but this jarred slightly, as though eBay had adopted an unsettlingly quaint American outlook on its representation in Britain. "Look! Here we are! And we love your UK!" But you can't phone us, and you can't write to us. This, I fear, is why eBay remains an organisation without a soul to so many of us. The one place they allow a little emotion, sentiment, even humanity to show through, and it's in their own offices, where you'll never ever see it.