Our UPS started acting up last week so I contacted APC (who make Conext UPS’s) and I just received an RMA and notification of shipment – funnily enough their email routine is broken as the tracking number shows up as 5.0751E+14

I received this email from onrebates.com this afternoon – “We regret to inform you that the above rebate claim has not been funded by the sponsoring manufacturer, Gigafast Inc., and therefore cannot be paid. Gigafast Inc. contracted with OnRebate.com Inc. to have OnRebate.com Inc. process Gigafast Inc. sponsored rebates but, in violation of the terms of this contract, Gigafast Inc. has not funded disbursements for several months and has not responded to our many funding requests or other attempts to reach them. As a result rebate disbursements to customers who purchased Gigafast Inc. products have not been made. At this point your rebate claim is being cancelled but your rebate details will be kept on file in the event that you are able to contact Gigafast, Inc. and get them to fund your claim.”
I’m not a lawyer but I imagine my contract is either with the shop or the rebate company, not Gigafast….As I paid on my credit card, it would be interesting to see what they have to say about it.
Update I’ve filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, Emailed Microcenter (if this was in the UK I’d have also requested money back from the credit card company as the contact was broken. There is also a forum at Fatwallet where people are also adding their comments and reactions – looks like Microcenter, onrebate and Gigafast are going to be pretty busy.
Update 2 [email protected] is rejecting emails – very fishy.
Update 3 Microcenter are honouring my rebat – see the fatwallet discussion for up to date news.

I decided that I needed some more memory for the pc at home as the performance is really sluggish and slow – switching between newzcrawler, thunderbird and firefox takes about 5-10 seconds. The pc has 512mb of memory already but it obviously needs more so I’ve purchased 2 sticks of 512mb memory for $80 (including postage). Considering this is less than the price of one stick from compusa I’m pretty pleased with the price and hopefully the pc will start to behave like normal – especially as I plan to set up a LAN party in the near future, I need a decent performing pc! I got the memory from NewEgg but I have to wait a couple of days before it gets here.

Home depot prices in a flyer they sent me have 4 out of 6 items at a higher price than their normal price – some sale that is. I know companies take advantage of Black Friday but this is ridiculous. However, I wouldn’t mind an air compressor for 7cents!

Kristen and I went to some garage sales this morning and we got some good bargains. We got a couple of sandwich cooler bags (which I need to keep my sarnies cool in the car whilst I’m driving to customers) for a couple of bucks each, Operation and battleship games for 30cents each – a bargain although I’m much better at Operation than Kristen – even when I use my left hand – she had a flukey series of lucky guesses with battleships and it took me another 16 shots to sink her battleships after she had sunk all of mine.
We also got a HP Deskjet 930c for $5 – our printer in the uk was a 940c model. We were told it had a paper jam in it which the previous owner couldn’t be bothered to fix and when I opened it up there was a sticky label in the innards – part on the back roller and the other half deep inside but as it was a thick plastic label it held together well so I was able to reach in and grab a corner and slowly peel it off. 5 minutes later I had an almost new printer for $5!
The same garage sale had a brand new full size tripod which we got for $5. Previously I’ve made do with a wall and a mini tripod but now I can take this one around for family shots etc.
Whilst driving around we drove through one estate in Dublin, Tartan fields, and the houses there are (gi)(e)normous. Most of them had 4 car garages and some looked like they were almost their own gated community. The sad thing is that most of the houses probably only had 2 people living in them. If you feel like donating some money to the building fund then take a look at this listing site – only another 3.5billion adsense clicks needed to put a deposit down 🙂

The final rebate (out of 5) arrived this afternoon and was actualy the first item purchased way back on the 23rd April 2005. It has taken 3 months and 2 days to arrive (as I sent the data off on the 24th) on a rebate that should have taken 6-8 weeks according to the small print.
The BestBuy (who got their wrists slapped for misbehaving on rebates) rebate on the same item arrived on the 31st May.
Now you can see why people refuse to use rebates for items. However, it is difficult to get the same or similar products at a comparable price without resorting to the rebate con.

We received the check from HP yesterday for the rebate for our computer which was nice and fast – less than 4 weeks from purchasing the computer and sending the rebate stuff off. The funny thing is that I received an email this morning to say that the cheque had been cleared for payment and to wait 2-4 weeks to receive it. It is not often that snail mail is quicker than email!
I’m still awaiting confirmation from all of the other rebates I’ve applied for – none of them have even acknowledged the receipt of the application. This area of shopping needs some serious looking at by government inspectors or something – either that or they should let me have a job where I can take 12 weeks to answer a letter of correspondance!