Eager to make his quota of cold-calls
Do you remember a PC magazine called "PC Magazine"? Well in the early 90s before the internet proper, the adverts in the magazine used to have a small 3-digit number in a bubble somewhere in the smallprint. In the magazine was a pull out card with numbers on and you coloured in the appropriate number (a bit like when you buy a lottery ticket) for the company/product you were interested in, filled in your details and sent it off. The publishers would then send your details off to whoever you'd picked and they would then send you more information.

So I went through the magazine and coloured in bubbles for probably 90% of the ads and sent it of. About 2 weeks later I started getting loads of literature for all sorts of stuff, including several demo disks (some were 5.25" disks) and even a hardback A5 diary that looked like a Notebook. Big fat envelopes with thick brochures arrived nearly every day for nearly 2 weeks, sometimes in bundles of a dozen or so packages. Bear in mind that I didn't have a computer at all except for a Spectrum + with a dodgy power supply.

Eventually the post dried up and that was that.

About 6 months later, one Sunday morning, the phone rang at about 10:30am, so my wife runs downstairs to answer it thinking it was something urgent. I hear her umming a bit and then she calls me to the phone.
I then had a perverse conversation with a man with an unintelligible Southern drawl. The basic gist was that he was calling about some obscure middleware for what I think was SuperCalc 4. I asked him where he got my number from as I certainly didn't put it on the card. Being half-asleep I sort of uh-huh'd at him as he slurred his way through his spiel which ended up with him offering to send me a demo of the software. By now, I'm getting fed up and tea and Frosties were beckoning, so I said sure ok.

He then said I'd have to pay carriage for it and wanted my credit card details so he could bill me for it. We were skint and didn't even have a bank account at the time, so we did everything by cash. I told him we didn't have one, he sounded incredulous, and then asked if my parents had a card I could use. I knew they didn't but I told him that I aren't getting my bike out and cycling to their house at stupid o'clock.

He couldn't get his head around the fact that I didn't have a credit card yet didn't live with my parents as if one precludes the other. I asked him again how he got my number, and then he began the spiel again about the product, halfway through which he hung up.

Now that's dedication if he's willing to call someone in the Uk from America in the middle of the night.

Length? Probably about 10c per min off-peak plus a few dollars for some strong coffee.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Tue 8 Sep 2009, 18:28, 1 reply)

Sounds a bit like
You've won 20million Ugandan moneys! You should have forwarded him all your bank details just in case
(Freddles, Tue 8 Sep 2009, 20:37, closed)