Customer Support Hell (and Heaven):

When we bought our new dishwasher, we qualified for a $50 rebate. I hate filling in rebate forms. I know they are out to get me if I make the slightest mistake. So I agonized over my form and (I thought) I got everything right.

Weeks later, I got a very polite letter. “Hey, we want to help you,” it said, “but you submitted the wrong invoice.” Darn. I submitted the bill for the dishwasher itself, forgetting that our rebate was for the installation, not the dishwasher. I plead guilty to this mistake, but it's easy to make. It seems weird to get a rebate for the installation and NOT have to submit the bill for buying the item.

So I carefully resubmitted, just ahead of their deadline.

Two weeks later we got a weird postcard advising us that one or more of our rebate requests could not be fulfilled, or was being fulfilled for partial credit. So of course I called the customer service number. They found my file at once, almost as if they had been waiting for me. I was told that it could take them three weeks for my resubmission to get into their files (this is after 2.5 weeks by the way, so for all we knew, they were still going to get my corrected letter). But they did not have my resubmission just now. Could I FAX everything to them in the next hour or be damned? (They put it more politely than that.)

My fault again, I could find only part of my paperwork. But I did find the invoice for the installation. This is the ONE thing they did not have on file, but they insisted I file the other paperwork that they already had but I couldn't find. I begged for, and got, a one day reprieve to find my paperwork.

That was Thursday. Friday was a busy day, and I simply gave up on getting the rebate.

Now it's Saturday night. I stumbled over the remaining paperwork, and I'm now in a position to FAX EVERYTHING to them. But I won't, and here's why:

In Saturday's mail, we received the full $50 rebate.