Friday, March 19, 2004

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CompUSA Rebate Thievery I recently asked a friend to pick up a FireWire card for me at CompUSA, when he was there on another errand. The card in question was $45, with a $20 rebate. I promptly completed the rebate form and sent it in. A few weeks later, I received an email from CompUSA stating that my rebate had been rejected because it was non-transferable. It took me a moment even to figure out what the problem was. Because from my point-of-view, nothing had been transferred. But I looked at the receipt, and saw that he had paid by credit card. Now, before I continue my rant, let me just clarify. In no way was this an attempt to get around the letter or spirit of the rebate rules, as I understood them. In other words, my friend had not also bought the same item himself. Nor was I trying to use a different address. I was the real purchaser of this item (he was acting merely as my agent in picking it up), and I was trying to claim the rebate I was entitled to. So first I tried calling the rebate servicer. No luck there, they said the rules were that the purchaser was the end-user entitled to the rebate. Of course, if I had known that in the first place, I could have just had the rebate sent to him. In the meantime, I had checked CompUSA's rebate FAQ, and just as I suspected, it said nothing about this so-called end-user rule. So then I tried emailing CompUSA. That resulted in, I think, a machine-generated reply stating that the rebate was rejected for a legitimate reason I followed up with a much stronger email, pointing out that the only reason they had even been able to reject me was that my agent had happened to use a credit card. He could just as easily have used cash, in which case they never would have known the difference. The result was a slighly less mechanical, but no less unsatisfactory, response. At which point I gave up. The really galling part is the arbitrariness of it: their tactic to cheat people out of their rebates only works for people who pay by credit cards. 4:05:09 PM    comment []

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Semi-Urban Legend Encounter This morning, a colleague stopped by to tell us about a documentary from the Independent Film Channel, Delusions in Modern Primitivism, that his TiVo had automatically recorded (using its preferences inference feature; that was his story, anyway!). Saving myself the trouble of re-telling it, I'll quote from this capsule review site: The "film tells the story of Jeremy, a young man living in Dallas, Texas. He has many tattoos and body piercings, but that isn’t enough for him. He wants to take it to the next level, something that will be an expression of how he feels about the world. So he drives to a warehouse and pays someone $500 to shoot him in the shoulder with a hollow point bullet. (That way there will be more of an exit wound.)". My first comment was that I strongly suspected urban legend. So as we continued to talk about it, I searched the web. I tried Snopes.com, and came up empty, but when I searched on the film title, it didn't take long to find the above site, which goes on to say: "Though ultimately a fake ala Blair Witch, this is a very convincing short. I’m sure that many people seeing it will believe that it’s real. I didn’t catch on until after. The story plays out perfectly. Jeremy talks about his philosophy and how he wants something more, but you don’t find out what he’s after until about half way through. The jerky hand held camera and poor sound quality give it a documentary feel.". As always with urban legends, there are the clues of falsity: 1. Apparently it wasn't a private indivdual who performed shoot-for-hire, it was a small company that had a setup in a warehouse. Way too unlikely; much more believable had it been a private individual. 2. $500 is way too cheap. Imagine--in the hypothetical case it was not a hoax--what it would cost in legal fees. Tens of thousands. 3. The fact that it is in Texas is just a little too obvious; so that is a somewhat weak, circumstantial clue. 11:29:09 AM    comment []