Hi everyone :)

I was in an electrical store earlier (Comet for you UK guys) and i could hear one of the assistant people trying to get this family to buy a laptop, whist casually looking at the printers. He was saying that they do a "laptop starter pack" which includes half price norton (which they recommend :eek:), a 1gb flash drive and some other stuff for £60, he then says something like the flash drive is worth £50 anyway, which it obviously isn't, mine cost about £6 :D

It was one of those laptops that they have on offer for a bank holiday weekend but they had some left over. It was just so hard not going up to them and saying look, this laptop won't run vista and that sales guy is trying to sell you things you don't need and lying through his teeth ;)

Anywho, i just thought i'd share this experience and see what people have to say :D

Thanks for reading

Comet AND Currys are full of 'supreme hand lovers' like that!
There's one guy in my local Currys, he must have worked then for 10 years now, he grins like a flippin cheshire cat all the time and i avoid him like the plague.....cos he's a tosser! They really do not know what the hell they're talking about most of the time. Bunch of nuggets!

Somehow I do believe that I have lost something in the translation! lol

These stores are ridiculous, I tried to buy a £30 Printer in Curry's and was asked 'Do you have a cable.' Surely the printer comes with the cable in the box, but NO.

I'm forced to fork out £10 for a freakin cable, although they did graciously ask if i wanted to pay an extra £5 for a Belkin one that was a couple of metres longer. How decent of them.


Something I find ironic though, is on the PC World adverts, where they're talking about Intel Core 2 Quad processors, most of the people watching haven't a cluewhat they're on on about!

Somehow I do believe that I have lost something in the translation! lol

I would be only to pleased to translate it for you mate. However, It would have to be via pm`s, since it wouldn`t be suitable for an open thread lol.

Regards Howard :)

which bit needs translating? :p

heh....well I can imagine what they mean. But "supreme hand lovers", "tosser" and "bunch of nuggets". :D

although they did graciously ask if i wanted to pay an extra £5 for a Belkin one that was a couple of metres longer. How decent of them.

Thanks for the laugh!

Halo, I think I got the "nuggets", but not the other ones.

nice to see this thread's taken off :D

i couldn't bring myself to work in a shop like that because they're just interested in sales and they have stuff like the laptop i saw that probably wasn't up to spec for vista and if you know what you're talking about when it comes to pc's then how could you bring yourself to sell a toshiba laptop with 512mb ram? i used to have 512mb and vista on its own would use way more than half of that. you'd have to say "look, you don't want that, you want the HP one :D i know it's expensive but it's worth it"

do they really make you buy the cables separately? i was thinking about getting a printer from comet or curry's.digital (i still call it dixons though haha) but i won't get a cable from there, a good site for cables and other bits is cableuniverse.com, failing that just try ebay :D

i buy 2m usb printer cables from a local pc shop. £2 each. Its a printer it doesn't need gold contacted usb cables at £15.. :)

I refuse to patronize Circuit City. The sales people there are on you like white on rice the moment you walk in the door! I got tired of telling them to bugger off so now I go to Best Buy if I need to purchase electronics from a store. Stupid (literally in most cases) comissioned sales people!

it's crazy what some people will do to get paid, even if they don't know a thing about pc's then they'll push a sale until you're at the checkout, at which point you know they're figuring out how much commission they're getting for that sale

I refuse to patronize Circuit City. The sales people there are on you like white on rice the moment you walk in the door! I got tired of telling them to bugger off so now I go to Best Buy if I need to purchase electronics from a store. Stupid (literally in most cases) comissioned sales people!

I feel the same way about BestBuy too. I now do some shopping at officemax since I have some friends that work there.

I believe 'nuggets' is a Battlestar Galactica term for 'rookie' or 'newbie' In this context it probably means morons or eve 'supeme hand lovers.

I remember I went to BestBuy along time ago, this guy wanted to buy a cheap videocard so he could have 2 monitors hooked up and the employee guy said to buy a 8800GTX :haha:

of course, 8800 gtx's are so cheap we all have them :D haha he just wants his commission

i think i might have said this before but it really is amazing what people will do for money

I don't care about money dave ;)

I wouldn't mind having it though :haha:

it would be good to have some wouldn't it :D i just realised that i get paid next week and still have quite a bit of my pay from this month left because i've been trying to save for driving lessons ;) usually i'd be pretty much broke by now haha

this isn't exactly to do with sales people but i saw a set of speakers in my local currys.digital the other day that had "windows vista compatible" written on them, which goes to show the extent of the vista compatibility issue, if there's a set of speakers out there that don't work with vista or any os, i haven't seen them yet :D

oh yeah, bump as well ;)

Lol, OMG! vista compatible speakers!!!
The day an OS is fussy over 3mm phono jack compatibility speakers, well thats the day we should be dusting off the ZX Spectrums!

that's what i thought! i should have taken a picture or something haha

at the time i just thought "what the... vista speakers???" i'll see if they still have some next time i go into the shop :D

vista compatible speakers indeed...

I borrowed this little gem from Raybay, (who borrowed it from George Carlin):

Think of how stupid the average person is,
and realize half of them are stupider than that.

- - - - George Carlin

I think it illustrates the "Zen" principle of retail marketing wherein the customer, the salesman, and the marketing execs. are all one........big imbecile. Still I would sleep way "more better" knowing that my speakers were Vista compatible, save for the fact that now I don't know if they'll work with XP.

that's a pretty good quote :D

you make another good point too though, it should say "vista compatible, plus it'll still work with xp" on them shouldn't it? ;)

You have to almost sympathize with manufacturers. I said ALMOST. Just when they think that fool proof is sufficient, the next generation of sales people and customers come along to necessitate raising the design standard to idiot proof.

"Supreme Hand Lover", is that anything on the order of "endlessly self dating"?

"Supreme Hand Lover", is that anything on the order of "endlessly self dating"?

You're on the right track, yes! :D

Lol, Self-dating.....with the five finger sisters! :evil:

the entire issue with usb cables not included "in the box" is not entirely the retailer's fault.. manufacturer's pack it they sell it. At least some sales people are decent enough to mention it, rather than the average joe going home, finding out its not there and swearing his head off at the world conspiring against him.

with the fool-proof concept on products, lemme put it this way. I work at a shop that sells tech stuff, stationary etc. and without fail every day at least 5+ customers come up to me asking where printer inks are. Now, in this store there is a gigantic sign (among multitudes of posters saying "looking for printer inks? Go to Inkworks") saying "Inkworks". 3 of those mentioned customers also ask whilst standing directly in front of them.

Look guys, treat going into these places as a source of entertainment. Most of us know more about PCs than a shopful of these boxshifting eejits so use your knowledge to babblespeak with them. Most of them will not understand what you are on about especially if you make up some piece of jargon - like P standard wireless networking for example.
Perhaps we could have a new thread just for the best bit of nonsense you got a salesman to believe and go and find out more about?

well just to clear something, Printer USB cables are never part of the kit , Yes the cable has to be purchased separatly ,
its cause the margin on printer is so less , Manufacturers dont make much profit of printers , its the ink that gets the revenue

You shouldn't be buying printer cables from most places you buy a printer. I've found the best places to get a USB cable (of any type) is Big Lots or Monoprice.com

"Look guys, treat going into these places as a source of entertainment... Most of them will not understand what you are on about especially if you make up some piece of jargon"

that's the best part :D if you get someone who doesn't know that much about pc's then you can make things up and as long as you sound convincing and know what you're on about then they'll pretend they understand :D

you could go on about ram flux or micro usb jolt failure or something (i'm making these up as i go along) and you just have to have a serious look on your face and they'll play along :D

ahhh, isn't being a nerd so much fun ;) haha


on the printer note, in the uk cableuniverse.com is a good place for cables of all sorts, from hdmi to parallel if you're feeling old school

An interesting element in all this turns out to be that there are equally incompetent sales erks on the other side of the Atlantic and they attract the same sort of opinion.
A long time ago, before most of you were born, I was once summoned as an expert (an ex is a has-been and a spurt is a drip under pressure) witness in a court case against PCWorld, UKs greatest box shifter. Their technical manager stated that there was no such thing as a copy of Windows 98 upgrade (from Windows 95). I said there was and produced one out of my case. The PCWorld bloke then started shouting at the judge, saying it was a fabrication and a made up job. Needless to say they lost the case. Tee Hee. Joy Unbound. Dance amongst the flowers, etc etc.

haha i wish i was there to see that ;)

i was around when win 95 was, our first pc had it and a 610mb hard drive and 90mhz processor :D

AlbertLionheart is my new idol! :grinthumb :D

k.jacko - you are too kind!
Talking of old things - anyone any idea what this is/was? The little drive beside it is a 40Gb 2.5" - I have had the big one just for fun for years but have no idea about its capacity or what it was for.

WOAH that's huge!

i'll look on wikipedia ;)

---

as far as i can see it's a hard drive just really old :D does it have anything that looks like an ide connector or anything like that?

not a winchester drive is it?

I think winchester drive was a generic term for a hard drive in the days when most PCs didn't have one at all. I just tried to weigh this and it is over 7 lbs wt. Did not do the kitchen scales much good....

google says that a winchester drive is "Originally meant to signify that the drive used Winchester technology, but many times it is used to mean it is a fixed disk drive, implementing either Winchester or Whitney technology and non-removable disks sealed in a contaminant-free housing." so basically a hard drive by the looks of it :)

on the topic of large storage media, who remembers these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc)?

The thing does not have an IDE connector - it is more like the spade connector they used to use on the 5.25" floppy disk drives. I had another look at it and there are no manufacturer's marks at all.

i know i'm kind of bringing an old(ish) thread back but i remembered a time that i had a GOOD experience in a pc shop :grinthumb

i was on holiday and wanted to get a pcmcia usb adapter for my laptop. i found a small pc shop but didn't want to go in shouting out random computer acronyms so asked for a laptop usb adapter. the guy said "do you mean a pcmcia usb card" or something of the sort and i was a bit surprised that he decided to go saying computer acronyms at me :D i felt my geeking was appreciated in said shop haha

it was only a small shop which is probably why the guy knew what he was on about, if it was comet or pc world i expect they'd get confused and try to sell me a cd rom drive or something :p

I needed the same thing once in Canada so went into the London Drug store in Victoria - bloke knew exactly what I wanted ahd it was cheap too.
Great country - just wish I could live there but my wife won't let me (and she is Canadian)!

A friend of mine had a Pioneer Laserdisc player back in 83-84. He thought it was the greatest thing since, well, sliced bread. He had it hooked up to his stereo system, but the speakers were to far away from the tv so the sound seemed to be disconnected from the action on screen because there wasn't any center channel to localize the sound.

I remember video tape movies costing over $100.00 each

good ol' laserdiscs ;)

they were before my time but you can still buy them on eBay :D

i read about them on wikipedia ;)

I know this will probably bring the swarm down on me...

I recently went to one of the Apple Stores in a mall in St. Louis because I was interested in picking up a new nano. I told my sister that I didn't need to buy one that day and that if I got talked to like I was an idiot or if they pressured me I wasn't going to get one there. I walked in and there was a rep at nearly every table, and at every section. I started looking at the Nanos and the rep came over and asked me if I had any questions, I said no and he left me alone. Then I went over and looked at a few other things in the store and came back and told the dude what I wanted. He said ok, went in the back and brought out my Nano, and I paid for it right there. He had a credit card scanner thing like UPS and FedEx do for signing for packages. It was a very plesant expierence and suprised me, I expected the reps to be 'full of smug'.

Lol, Self-dating.....with the five finger sisters! :evil:
They're always faithful! :D

It was a very plesant expierence and suprised me, I expected the reps to be 'full of smug'.
i was expecting some sort of big twist when i was reading that :D

how exactly it would twist i wasn't sure but i was waiting for it all the same :p

Well Curry's and Pc World store advisors will do anything to get you buy a computer ect... from them. lol.

Regards Jase :)

good point ;)

if i'd have said to them "i need a pcmcia usb adapter for my laptop cos it has no usb ports" they'd be like

"no usb ports eh? huh, how about that. why don't you buy this bargain toshiba laptop that doesn't have enough memory but looks nice!"

:haha: :haha:

Yes, thats always the case. lol

Regards Jase :)

i can understand they have to make money and that but i couldn't bring myself to sell something to somebody that i knew wasn't up to scratch

btw congrats on the 700th post Jase (#47 in this thread) :) you're catching up with me ;) haha