Loading ...
Was slightly exasperated by this request from a potential eBay buyer -
“I take it you’ve listened to the CD you’re listing. I was wanting to know which version of “come follow me” was on it. One version is the “radio mix” and the other is the original album version, both noticably different sounding. If you have their album “Rise”, it should be easy to tell if the ep version and the one on Rise are exactly same or not (or if you don’t have it, you can find both Rise and that ep on the uk itunes store and see the sound difference). Also, does the song on the ep sound a little quiet and has to be turned up a bit louder to be heard a bit better or is it regular volume like any song? And do you have their Rise album? i’m not looking to buy it cuz i already have it.”
So essentially, what he wants me to do is listen to my CD, then purchase one, possibly two more versions of the same song (by a band I’ve never heard of) from iTunes, and to compare and contrast the three for audio similarities - costing half an hour or so of my time and at least £1.60. And then answer a completely redundant question as an encore.
The price of the CD in question? £2.99. With free postage.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Irritating Things, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
That request is ridiculous, but the first two paras are not that bad - up to that point I felt some sympathy for someone who’s clearly looking for something very specific and is trying his hardest to make sure he buys the right thing. Then in the third paragraph he stops using the [shift] key for his i’s and then makes the unforgiveable error of using “cuz” instead of “because”.
Recommended response: “Dear Sir - I’m sorry I can’t oblige you in your request BECAUSE I don’t give a shit (… and further will not spend £1.58 on iTunes to answer stupid questions relating to a £2.99 item). You twot. Yours faithfully etc.”
“Sympathy for someone who’s clearly looking for something very specific” - well, yes and no. This is obviously a big fan of the band; he’s FAR more likely to have access to relevant resources / fansites / people who will know the answer to his extremely specific question.
Bear in mind that, even if I say so myself, I’m highly specialised within my field (and OK, I freely admit that it’s a field filled with the cowpats of comparative failure for an Oxbridge graduate, enormous unimportance in the grander scheme of life and near-certain disappointment to my parents), and as such, my time doesn’t come cheap. If you’ll excuse a ludicrously self-aggrandising analogy, what he’s doing is essentially the equivalent of asking a brain surgeon to run a spectroscopic analysis of three different samples of stuff that he’s scraped at different times from the crack between the skin and the nail on his big toe to satisfy his curiosity as to which can be scientifically proven to smell the worst.
What was the upshot of this in the end, Taf? Did you respond to the moron in question?
Spent 15 mins comparing and contrasting the different versions of the song (which was crap, by the way) and gave him his answer - heard nothing back. No purchase, certainly no thanks, not even an acknowledgement. I might as well have sent him a picture of a turd, explaining that it was what I didn’t give about his enquiry.
Taf, I’m concerned that, not only are you talking to yourself in the first two comments on this post, but you don’t even agree with yourself…
Well spotted, LZ. Posts 1 and 2 were, in fact, transcribed from an e-mail conversation between myself and TM. I appear to have failed to reflected that fact in the associated accreditatory nomenclature.
It’s easy to point the finger at me since it was my mistake, but TM - why didn’t YOU spot this? I have to wait for LZ to come back from French frickin’ Guiana to point out that I’ve been looking like a schizophrenic grammar nerd for the last 3 weeks? Half silico-banana rations for you until further notice!
I think mainly because I was sulking about having my prose censored to make it fit for human consumption*. Now I get to sulk about reduced rations. Maybe I’ll just throw my faeces at the internet to see if it breaks.
* - The non-blog discussion featured me dropping the C-bomb, which on balance it probably was best to remove (… you censorious ████ … WHAT? What the ████ is that? ███ ███ ████ ██ █████ ████? This ██ outrageous, ███████ ████ The Guardian, ███████ is ███ free ████, ███████ █████!)
I wager 6 1/2 VP points that the C-bomb in question was what TM actually said instead of ‘twot’.
LZ - were you to do so, you would be the recipient of at least 13 VP points, depending on the odds offered at time of your stake being placed.
TM - massive kudos on your extremely amusing censored rant, especially for the bit where you link to a post which makes me a massive hypocrite. (You cunt.)