I want to buy a laptop hard drive for a project. I could easily order the one I want from Newegg for about $75, but I thought it’d be nice to get one sooner, so I called around to see what was available in the area.

First I called CompUSA (which admittedly is going out of business) hoping I could score a good deal, but I never got through to anyone. The phone just rang and rang and rang. I tried twice.

Then I called Circuit City (which is only a few blocks away) and waded through their phone menu system, eventually narrowing down to the fact that I wanted “product availability and pricing” for “computer” “hardware”. I somehow ended up being redirected to a general customer service person with apparently no knowledge of whether they carried internal laptop hard drives or not.

So he attempted to transfer me to their computer department 3 times, and by the third time finally said, “Hold on, let me just walk over and ask someone.” Yeah, why don’t you, I thought.

Then he came back on the line and asked, “Do you mean, memory?”

“No, I mean an internal laptop hard drive.” At this point I didn’t dare specify that I wanted a 7200RPM IDE drive. I heard muffled talking in the background.

“Umm, yeah, he said we do.”

“Well can I get any information about what types—”

“He said they start at $100 and go up depending on the quality [sic] of the drive—”

“Ok, thanks.”

Finally I called Best Buy, and surprisingly the phone just rang and rang and rang. For over 4 minutes. No one answered.

Why oh why isn’t there a Fry’s in San Francisco? They’d make a KILLING.

I might just scoot down to CompUSA and pick through whatever’s left on racks. Verdict: no luck. Only SATA laptop drives. :(

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