Rather hard day today....Plenty of work to be done, a shop full of employees and all that....All in all I was pleased with the day until the phone calls started
My wife/receptionist/accountant called and said that she had someone calling me because she could not make the person understand about the value of his e-scrap.
This is not uncommon...Many times customers will not discuss certain things with my wife...Some kind of crazy "women are not as smart as men" thing which is wrong on many levels and totally not true in the case of my company. My wife has me by at least 40 points in the IQ department
Anyway this guy calls and says that he has some e-scrap that he wants to sell...No problem, I say, what do you have?
He said hard drive boards, probably 200-300 pounds of them. Now my heart is jumping...That will be a great payday....But then he says that he cut the fingers off the boards.
So naturally I tell him that hard drive boards do not come with fingers...They generally have a series of pins (there are some hd boards that have small fingers on them).
He says he was told that he got a bunch of hard drives and that he had taken the boards out of them and then cut off the fingers. He wanted to sell the fingers and the boards.
So I asked him to describe the boards and by the description he was telling me that they were PCI cards. So I told him what I would pay for the fingers and the boards. Well that started a whole other conversation. Thanks to a few friends of his and an internet connection he discovered that there was gold on the fingers. So he disagreed with the price I was offering. So I said no problem and told him to call if he needed anything else.
An hour later he called back....He had taken the fingers to a local gold buying place and the pawn shop since his buddies had assured him that they were made of solid gold...Needless to say he was turned away without a dime more in his pocket. Upon calling back he wanted to know if I knew how to remove the gold with acid so he could sell the gold to the gold buyers....I have some general knowledge of this process but nothing that would warrant telling anyone else how to do it so I told him I did not know how it was done and that I did not suggest doing so since it was dangerous. Once again he decides he can do better and hangs up.
I was hoping that this was the end of it....But then the phone rang again 30 minutes later.....He decided he wanted to sell the items to me but he wanted me to raise my price specifically for him...I told him that I would not do that. So he said fine, he would still sell me the stuff...Great, how much do you have? Well I think it is 200 pounds....This of course raises a few red flags so I ask him how many "hard drives" he tore down.....He tells me that he tore down 20 units total....Just like I thought.
So I told him that there was no way that it was 200 pounds. Well that ticked him off and he said he would find someone else.....I had a hard time not telling him that was I was very glad he was finding someone else....
I am hoping that he does not call back tomorrow, I really don't think that I have the energy for that
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Originally Posted by Kris Kringle
P & M Recycling - Specializing in E-Waste Recycling. 
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