I guess it comes from having worked for a company that sold software for salesmen in the past, but I really don’t like pushy salesmen, the ones that really don’t know how to take no for an answer. Thanks to the telephone preference service I’ve managed to get rid of the majority of the cold calling salesmen, however one place that I still get them is online.

For example I periodically get sales pitches through the contacts form on the blog, usually asking if I could promote some product or other to my ‘customers’. Quite apart from the fact that they usually have missed the point that being a blog I don’t tend to consider that I have customers, it is usually something either unrelated to what I write about, or alternatively from a company or organisation that I don’t use myself, so don’t really regard it as ethical to promote.

Anyway, recently I had two identical comments from a salesman at ShareResults asking me to promote Real Networks SuperPass Scheme (Rhapsody their iTunes Music Store equivalent mentioned in the scheme promotion is US only). It has to be said that the only reason I even have the RealPlayer on my system is because some of the BBC News feeds are only available in that format. We have actually inadvertently tried the Superpass scheme too, as a result of Beth downloading the free trial version of RealPlayer which automatically starts charging your credit card as opposed to the free version. Suffice to say that there wasn’t anything that appealed in the premium service that I couldn’t get for free either elsewhere online, or by turning on the TV!

As usual, I just ignored the comment, since they’d managed to deliver two identical messages it seemed like a spamming exercise anyway. However, yesterday I got another one chasing me up because I hadn’t replied and including the line:

If you do not wish to receive any further communication from us, please do let me know.

I then had one of those devil on one shoulder, angel on the other moments where part of me thought that this was just an attempt to get me to talk, the other that if I said I wasn’t interested, then they’d stop sending messages, so I replied.

So guess what, despite the first line of the e-mail stating that I wasn’t interested either in promoting their service, or using it, rather than a ‘Thanks for letting us know’ e-mail as promised, I got a classic pushy sales routine where they blissfully ignored the fact that I wasn’t interested and tried again to persuade me to promote their service. I’ve replied with a pretty terse but still fairly polite e-mail, however if they try again, I’ll just have to blacklist them.

Typical, should have trusted my instincts!