I was doing my occasional rummage around looking at prices of drives. By the way, there's 8tb drives offered by Maplin for £189.99 and Aria for £187.14, and that looks like the best buy right now.
One of the sites I checked was Bluepoint (£242.22 for the 8tb drive). And then I got a phone call. It was from Bluepoint!
What a coincidence, was my first thought, and then critical thinking kicked in. It wasn't a coincidence. To see Bluepoint's prices, you have to log in, so they saw me log in and what I was looking at.
I used to buy all my drives from Bluepoint, until about a dozen years ago, they delivered a batch that had obviously been dropped (you could see the damage on the drives). I tried to send them back as dead-on-arrival, but they wouldn't take it. Fortunately, Seagate honoured their guarantee, so I wasn't out of pocket, but the experience was one I didn't want to repeat. I totally stopped buying from Bluepoint.
And I haven't bought from then since, except perhaps the occasional bits and bobs.
But they have my details on record, of course, and hence the phone call.
Bluepoint is one of those companies who carefully choose staff with the most incomprehensible voices to make their outbound sales calls. I've never understood why some companies do this - perhaps they put their most recent hires onto it? Anyway, the guy had so much trouble pronouncing words, I had to get him to repeat his stuff several times. It turned out that he had settled on the idea that I was interested in 2tb drives, which I am very slightly, but principally I want the best "bang for the buck", the best price per terabyte, which is 8tb.
So I explained to him that it was 8tb I was interested in, and he offered to send me an email. "No," I said, "where on your web site?" So after a few seconds, he said they don't have any 8tb, which isn't what his web site says, but I'm not in the game of helping Bluepoint fix their data problem, so I politely said goodbye.
If this happens again, I'll stop visiting their web site.
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