Shawn has a nice success story with the Seagate company that provides an interesting twist on the EECB (Executive Email Carpet Bomb) technique that we’ve been telling you about for months:

I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB external harddrive about two or three months ago, and backed up several harddrives to it. Everything was going awesome on every computer I had, but then it had an issue on my desktop. “Delayed Write Failure” WHAT? I try to read the information on the drive, it won’t allow me.

I restart, can use it for a bit more, and then again…same Delayed Write Failure. So I google “freeagent delayed write failure”…and low and behold SEVERAL people are having the same issue with this same drive for this same reason. I searched fixes throughout the web (including their own forums)…attempted all of the fixes…none of which fixed my problem.

I call Tier 1 CSR’s in lovely India, who tell me my drive is dead. I then use the online CSR chat…but I’m of no use to him because I wasn’t physically in front of the computer in question.

Later that night I posted on the Seagate forums…and something snapped. I went to the Investor page of Seagate, found the Seagate email formatting, and posted the email addresses of about 20 executives in my post. That post was removed about 2 hours later…

However, later that day I got a call from an AWESOME Tier 3 CSR (name redacted for his protection, at his request) who stayed on the phone with me for 40 minutes. Low and behold the problem was a small string in my computer’s registry, and he told me that this is the normal issue with these drives when that error shows up, but he legally cant say that when people call customer service, because the registry is Microsoft’s software. So I have the fix, I’m now posting it to the Seagate Forums (he can’t tell people, but I can), and I am happy once again.

I’d probably suggest people call executive customer service, but feel free to go the email bomb route when you’ve hit peak frustration.

There’s a good way to get their attention, post your complaint along with the email addresses for the top executives right on their site’s investor forums. “I’m in your base, giving away the email addresses for 20 of your top dudes.” If you wanted to do something like that, here’s how to figure out corporate email address formats.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.