Some time ago now, I bought some wine from Virgin Wines. It was cheap, and the quality middling – though their full money-back offer if you didn’t like the wine was (and still is, I believe) too good to miss. As a customer of theirs they send me their marketing offers via email every now and then, and unlike many other companies, they send me an email maybe once a month.
Other internet retailers – This is good. I don’t want to know about your MEGA SPECIAL OFFERS more often than this. Once a week is too often. Twice a week is where I look for the unsubscribe links, and any more often than that and I’ll be blackholing your mail outright.
However, recently I’ve noticed that they’re resorting to some pretty daft e-marketing ‘tricks’ with their offer emails. Like the one above, which arrived with the subject line of ‘SAVE £192.50… a bottle! Only 500 cases left”.
The email paints the picture that Virgin are selling bottles of wine that could go for £200 a time, at the princely sum of £7.50. An amazing deal, if it were true.
When we heard, months ago, that Sheffield’s dilapidated ‘Roxy Disco’ building had been purchased by the AMG group – operators of the ‘Carling Academy’ music venues – with a view to it becoming the ‘Sheffield Carling Academy’ we were quite excited. As time moved on, and we found out that the venue’s opening act would be Grenoside’s own ‘Reverend & The Makers’, well, let’s just say that the clickthru to seetickets.com was more-or-less instantaneous.
As it turns out, it was quite lucky we bought our tickets when we did, because the gig sold out only a day or two later – pretty impressive for an act that’s only troubled the top 20 twice.
We arranged for my mum to pop over and babysit Aimee, and we toddled off to the bus stop for the bus to town – a little later than we’d planned, but we weren’t really bothered too much as we figured the first support act, ‘Toddla T’ (no, really) would be toss anyhow. If we’d could catch some ‘Smokers Die Younger’, the other support act, that’d be great. However, due to First South Yorkshire’s dire bus service (our ‘every 15 minutes’ service arrived after standing at the bus stop for nearly 50 minutes) and our mixed up assumption of the running order, we arrived at the Academy mid-way through ‘Toddla T’s set. Joy.
…are, mercifully, unfounded! 
I am a very busy bee, you see.
Off to a Reverend and the Makers gig tonight, will report tomorrow.
I know, I know, I know. I’m as disappointed in myself as you all must be. What a bastard, not updating the blog for a whole week.
Well, that’s well and truly broken the New Year’s resolution. Damnit.
As it happens, the last week has been very busy, and has had some ups as well as downs. There was a ‘shock’ announcement at work, David came to visit us, and Aimee learned how to point to the various parts of ones body in the “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” song! Such a busy life!
Anyhow, David came to visit and stay for the weekend, which was great. We’re doing some preliminary investigations into how feasible it might be for us to ‘tank’ out our cellar, and make it a livable room. Presently, the floor is laid with bricks – David dug some up and discovered that there’s just bare soil underneath – so it might be possible for us to rip the bricks out and get a proper floor laid.
In other news – last week, my employers decided to announce the closure of the office I work from, and relocate all staff to their head office some 45 miles away. This is somewhat surprising and certainly disappointing news, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t totally unexpected.
All the online April Fools’ jokes were poor this year. The whole point of them is that they’re supposed to be vaguely plausible – so you’d read/look at them and think that it’s real.
Who’s ever going to believe that Google and Virgin would open a Martian colony? Or that kernel.org.uk, the home of the Linux kernel, was switching to FreeBSD?
Then there’s the jokes that are just designed to get a laugh – like Youtube’s redirection of videos to the Rick Astley classic, “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
Maybe the days have gone where we’d be fooled into thinking spaghetti grew on trees, and we’re all far more ‘informed’, due to the wonderous interweb…