Updated: 11/1/05; 12:14:30 AM.
Ed Foster's Radio Weblog
        

Friday, October 21, 2005

I have a theory. By far the most common rebate gripe I get is from readers who have all the proof they could that they sent in the receipt with their rebate submission, but were nonetheless told by the rebate fulfillment house on the other end that their rebate must be denied because the receipt had magically disappeared. So, since we surely must assume the rebate operations wouldn't lie about a thing like that, the only alternative I can see is that the receipts are somehow being transported into another dimension. An experience a reader just had with a Netgear rebate adds credence to my supposition.

"I recently bought a Netgear 802.11N router at CompUSA," the reader wrote. "As usual, I got a second rebate receipt at the cashier. These are quite a convenience since they save you the time and effort of photo-copying the original receipt and they have pre-printed places for you to enter your name, address, email, etc."

The reader soon received an e-mail from Netgear thanking him for his purchase and providing him a link to check the status of his $10 rebate for the router. "Imagine my surprise when I checked the status of my rebate at the Netgear site and it told me that I had failed to include the receipt," the reader wrote. "Mind you, I got to the Netgear site by clicking a link in the e-mail they sent me. Think about that a minute ... yes, that's right. They e-mailed me to tell me I forgot to enclose the receipt when the only way they could have gotten my name and e-mail address was from the receipt!"

Clearly, the only logical explanation is that the receipt still existed when Netgear e-mailed him, but then it somehow dematerialized. In fact, I'd like to propose that theoretical physicists consider looking for the evidence to prove string theory by studying this phenomenon at rebate fulfillment houses. Hey, where else could all the receipts that keep getting sucked into thin air at these facilities be going but into one of the half dozen or more extra dimensions -- unseen in the world that we know -- that string theory advocates predict exist?

In any case, it at least does sound like the reader may get his rebate from Netgear after all. "I received a couple of automated replies to my protest, and then finally I got something that appeared to be human generated stating again that I had neglected to enclose my receipt," the reader wrote. "I replied to that and emphasized the fact that they must have received my receipt if they were able to e-mail me. A short while later I received another e-mail stating that I am a valued Netgear customer and that my rebate status had been changed to valid. So maybe they aren't complete idiots, but I won't hold my breath waiting for that check."

Good idea. After all, there's probably another one of those unseen dimensions reserved for rebate checks that are in the mail but never materialize.

Read and post comments about this story here.


1:36:28 AM  

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