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The kybard is nice. I like it. Everyone is jealous of me, at least in my imagination. I’m pestering the management at work (i.e., my dad), to buy me one for the office. But it gets better!

I bought a Linksys wireless router about a month and a half ago when I was preparing to move in to my new house, as there no cat-5 run through the house [nor is there coax, nor even grounded electric wiring, but that’s a story for another day (or is it?!)]. The day after I ordered the router, a $10 mail-in rebate became available, starting for purchases made, naturally, that day. Bugger that. I hate mail-in rebates (see below), but I would have liked that $10.

So imagine my feeling when just a few minutes ago I found a $10 MIR form for my new kybard, just two days after I bought it. WHY ME? I asked. (Not really. I know why me. It’s Steveism at its finest.)

And now imagine my feeling when I read the form to further my depression and discovered that the rebate has been valid since July 2 and goes through the end of this month! I even saved my receipt and the box (and no, Ben, I don’t always save those. I threw away my Super Nintendo box last week). So–here’s hoping–I’ll get my $10 back. I’m skeptical, and it’s because mail-in rebates are a crapshoot. I’m confident that companies hire teams of people whose sole job is to find ways to avoid actually giving you the rebate. Some are more logical (though still stupid) than others. Allow me to share two bad rebate experiences I have had.

Firstly, three years ago I bought a desktop computer from Best Buy. It had a $150 MIR from Best Buy and two rebates from HP: one for $20 and one for $50. I got my $150 back pretty quickly, which was nice, but I never saw the other $70. I got a letter back from HP regarding the $20 rebate, saying I had not submitted the correct UPC from the box, or something like that, along with a request to send the correct information to receive my rebate in a timely fashion. I promptly mailed the items, and never heard from HP again. They never sent me anything regarding the $50 rebate.

I’m still bitter.

The other rebate is more recent. From January 2005 to June 2006 Warner Bros. had a TV-on-DVD rebate program celebrating 50 years of TV, or something. I bought four seasons of “Smallville,” which qualified for a $30 rebate. I held on to the rebate form until near the end of June, just in case I happened to my some more Warner TV DVDs. I ended up buying first season of “The Closer.” It wasn’t on the list of eligible titles, but the list was printed before “The Closer” was released, so I called the toll-free number on the form to ask if it was eligible.

The ever-so-helpful person who answered the phone said that it wasn’t on the list she had, but it wouldn’t hurt to send in the proof-of-purchase, just in case, so I did.

At the beginning of August I got a letter back from Warner Bros. saying that my rebate submission was ineligible because I had submitted an invalid proof-of-purchase. They even sent me back my rebate form, copies of receipts, proofs-of-purchase, and even the original envelope I had mailed to them, with the words “CLOSER NOT A ELIGIBLE SEASON” written on it in red. Yes, the person could spell “eligible” but not preface it with the correct article.

I had to resubmit correct information by the end of August. Submitting the correct information involved removing the tape that held “The Closer” proof-of-purchase to the rebate form, sticking the form, receipts, etc. in a new envelope, finding another stamp–which in turn involved trying to find a post office (stamps? What for? I pay my bills online. I email people. IT’S 2006!)–and mailing it. What, the person processing the rebate couldn’t remove the offending proof-of-purchase? Warner Bros. paid someone to write on my envelope, attach a form letter, and mail it back to me. And for postage. Here’s hoping I get my $30.

I’m glad that Office Max has nearly done away with mail-in rebates. I read that Best Buy is doing away with them sometime next year, as well. I applaud that. I think mail-in rebates are one of the stupidest things in the universe, right up there with tofu smoothies. If a manufacturer has a rebate, the reseller should cut the price by that much for the customer and then recoup the money from the manufacturer. None of this make the customer do it crap.

I don’t have a good ending though. It’s 1:40 a.m. and my brain just shut off. I really like the new Barenaked Ladies single, “Easy.” “Maybe You’re Right” is also stuck in my head–probably because I am.

I bought my first ergonomic keyboard last night. It’s the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000. So far, I love it, though I’m having trouble with the Y key on occasion. My friend Adam introduced me to it a few months ago and I found it at CompUSA for $30, so I figured why not?

The best part is that thanks to Scott Adams, I have a really hard time saying “keyboard.” I keep having to correct myself in front of my daughter, who is learning to talk. I figure I should at least teach her the real word, and let her mispronounce it as she sees fit, like when she says “monkeys” or “veggies.” Who knows how “kybard” would come out.

She’s just so darn cute.

A block and a half from my new house is a branch of the Bank of American Fork. There is a large sign in the front that I drive by every day, which says:

Bank of American Fork
Spanish Fork Branch

For some reason, I giggle every time I see that sign. My wife thinks I am crazy.

I do not, however giggle at the Cingular store sign. Rather, I get angry. In the month I have lived in my house, I have gotten approximately eight million times as many dropped calls as I have in the whole two years previous that I have been an AT&T/Cingular customer. The Cingular store that opened up just four blocks from the above-mentioned bank has a sign on the building that proudly proclaims “Fewest dropped calls of any network.” I even got a flyer in the mail yesterday reminding me that there is a new Cingular store in my neighborhood and that yes, Cingular has the “fewest dropped calls of any network.”

I tried to call Cingular and point out the irony, but my call was dropped.

I am sure to be recounting many fun stories about the primary sales person in my workplace, but here’s a small one, just for fun.

I maintain the company web site, what with me being a web programmer and all. This morning I found the following message in my email inbox:

“FYI – Canceled – account status page for realtors….spelled wrong. Cancelled is the correct spelling.”

Here is my response, carefully crafted to match his terse and ungrammatical approach to all things written:

“FYI – Canceled – every page word found on site….spelled right. Cancelled is an alternate spelling, especially in Britain, where we’re not.”

Well, the “fresh new look” is here, and no, I did not just do the “quote mark thing” with my fingers. I was using them to type, thank you very much. See here for my feelings on the finger quote thing.

Of course, “new features” are always “forthcoming,” whatever that means. Also “forthcoming” are lots of “interesting stories” (read: things I want to talk about, and who cares what you think, ha ha).

So anyway, as with finger quoting, I am severely annoyed by people who don’t put their shopping carts away after they have loaded their groceries, or lumber, or little puppies, or whatever, into their vehicles. I think cart-leaving should carry a dastardly penalty, like being forced to wear white after Labor Day, or chopping off a butt cheek, or something.

When I was at Wal-mart the other day, I came out of the store to find that someone had left a shopping cart 20 nanometers from my car. I angrily shook my fist at the sky in a manner suggestive that perhaps the rubber on the cart-offenders car tires could spontaneously combust and then melt to the road. I’m good at charades that way.

And then I went to Wal-mart twice today. That was probably my first (and second) mistake, but when Maceys wants $3.32 more for a bottle of Motrin, Wal-mart is getting my business. Plus, peaches at 69 cents a pound? I love me some peaches, but not peaches from Maceys, which are currently $1.49 a pound. But I digress. The first time I went to Wal-mart today was for some cold medicine and orange juice. As I walked to my car, I noticed a rogue shopping cart careening toward a van. Cursing the name of whomever had left it out in the open, I quickened my pace and caught the cart just before it smacked into the back of somebody’s minivan. Whew! Disaster averted. I drove away content in the knowledge that some stranger wouldn’t have to curse at chipped paint on their car. They would instead be able to curse at the lack of turn signal usage in Spanish Fork, unless they weren’t headed in that direction, in which case they could thank their lucky stars and do no cursing at all.

The second trip to the Wally was to fetch some Motrin for my wife, as well as the aforementioned peaches (of which I have already eaten two in the space of approximately as many seconds). This time I was getting into my car when I heard a crash behind me. I turned around to see that someone else had carelessly left a cart out in the open, which had rolled into–you guessed it–someone’s minivan. There were two women standing outside a car next to the minivan, and they had each done nothing to prevent the accident, nor did they seem to care enough to do anything to move the cart to somewhere more safe, like, I don’t know, the cart rack ten feet away from them. Who are these lazy people that can’t walk a cart three steps? You can lug your eighteen bags of Cheetos and ninety-two packs of beer around the Wal-mart, but your energy is magically stolen away when you get out in the sunlight?

In case you are thinking that averting damage to someone else’s property isn’t a good enough reason to put away your shopping cart, let me give another example from my own life.

In January of 1999, my then-girlfriend called me at 2 a.m. to take her to the grocery store, since she didn’t have a car and somehow urgently needed groceries at that time of night. I was looking for a little macking, so of course I took her. And of course she broke up with me in the car on the way to the store.

So what did I do? I smiled through the grocery store, helped her with her shopping, loaded the car with her bags of foodstuffs, and put the cart away. Then, keys still in hand–and her a little cold in the now-3 a.m.-early-January-air–I spotted another shopping cart a few hundred feet away. So, like any person with a sense of moral decency, I trudged off to fetch the lone cart and return it to the corral with its loving companions. This also had the added bonus of making my now-ex-girlfriend think I was leaving her in the cold, which warmed my heart a little bit, having just been dumped and all.

See? I felt good about me by putting my shopping cart away.