Abusing freebiesA friend of mine recently attended a 'Champaign Lunch', where he was compelled drink as much fizzy stuff as he could between the first and last courses. In an ideal world we'd ask restaurant staff to tell us stories about fatties stuffing themselves at All You Can Eat places, but we recognise that our members don't all work in the catering trade, so for the rest of you - tell us something about abusing freebies. BTW: Bee puns = you fail.
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lizard, Thu 8 Nov 2007, 14:16)
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Floppy disksBack in the early-mid 1990s I was an impoverished young computer geek with a hefty software-downloading habit. Since in those days I would have needed a second mortgage to afford an upgrade to my pathetically insufficient hard drive, I went through insane amounts of the then-popular 3.5" floppy disks.
They were sort of expensive and I was poor, but I noticed the free floppies that turned up in my mail now and then, which contained software and free trials for the online services of the period - America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe.
As many nerds of a certain age remember, those freebies still had the write-protect switches on them, were easily re-formattable, and were surprisingly high-quality disks, I imagine in order to survive trips through the post glued to boring magazines. The disks were also made freely available in display boxes, sitting on the counters of all the computer shops.
A few phone calls later, those three service providers somehow got the idea that my address was in fact a modestly successful computer shop. They happily sent me free cases of their floppies in DOS, Windows, and Macintosh flavors every month or so - enough to hold my stashes of data and still have enough to give away to other geeks.
This little scheme served me very well up until the days of damnably unwriteable CD-ROMs.
Apologies for texture.
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Rob T Firefly talked, like, William Shatner, on, Sat 10 Nov 2007, 23:16,
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