REBATE BLUES

Ridiculous deadlines: Heads up for those of you who bought holiday gifts where rebates were offered. I just got burned again by incredibly ridiculous fine print.

On 11/20, I bought a Hewlett-Packard 4215 HP Office Jet All-in-One printer/scanner/fax/copier, at Office Depot in Kingston, N.Y. I love it, (and it was reasonably priced -- $127.62). Supposedly, I was eligible for a $25 rebate. But with the launch of this blog, and with early deadlines for Law Technology News because of the holidays, I was just a bit busy and didn't have time to fill out rebate forms etc.  That was a bad move. Turns out, my purchase day was the last day the rebate was in effect, and I had to get the form processed by 12/04. Suffice it to say, I didn't even LOOK at the rebate form until today, 12/21.

I called Office Depot, and the customer service department was awesome. They checked to see if there were any other available rebates, and got right back to me. Unfortunately, there were none. They suggested I submit the rebate form anyway (but based on my experience in the past, these rebate houses seem trained by David Spade to figure out any possible way to turn away your rebate claim. "Sorry, you filed in a white envelope, not a blue one... too bad, your stamp wasn't affixed 1/16th of an inch below the top edge of the envelope...")

Anyway, I'm not holding my breath that I'll ever see the $25 bucks -- but the lesson to be learned is whenever you get ANYTHING with those six little letters, R E B A T E -- send it in the day you get it. And folo to the letter the instructions.

Meanwhile, manufacturers -- do you think you maybe could give us 30/60/or even 90 days to turn these things in?  Some of us have lives and can't do paperwork within minutes of buying things (but I sure will from now on).

But I still love HP -- (I'm on my second Pavilion computer, and third printer) and I highly recommend this nifty little compact multifunction gem. HP's designers get more savvy by the day. It's ingeniously designed, almost like an oragami bird, to fold out while in service yet stay slim when it's not, thus not hogging deskspace. (The paper feeders all fold back into the body of the device.) It's a great little machine and works like a charm.

But as for the rebate -- bah humbug, and caveat emptor to Santas everywhere!