Friends, let me tell you about the infuriating tool that corporations used this holiday season to fuck you in your consumer hind parts. It’s called a rebate. They have been around, but only lately have I genuinely noticed their insidiousness.

Have you ever purchased something with a small rebate, maybe ten dollars, and mailed in the card for the rebate only to get a notice saying that you weren’t elegible? Well, if you didn’t contest it, you just let them make that money off of you for the small price of a form letter.

See, it works like this: In the store they advertise a product for $100, even though it costs $125, by offering you a $25 manufacturer rebate. So you think, “Hey, I’m not actually paying $125 for this, they are sending me the money back!”

Then you send your card in for the rebate, and they deny it immediately. By the time you get the letter saying they have denied your application for a rebate, you have forgotten all about that $25 anyway, so you think “Well fuck it.”, because who has time to be sending all sorts of letters back and forth to jackass companies?

They just fucked you out of a free $25! The heads of the company dry wash their cold little hands and chickle softly to themselves at another hapless consumer impaled heartily on the truncheon of marketing!

This underhanded horseshit makes me so mad that I refuse to buy any product with a rebate. I don’t want to fuck with them. The problem is you almost can’t go into a Best Buy or CompUSA without the rebates being all over everything. Fry’s seems to be a little better about it, at least, but I haven’t been there as much so more data must be collected.

I bought a hard drive for my broken-ass computer the other day SPECIFICALLY because the asshole salesdouche said it didn’t have a rebate. Of course, when I got to the counter, the clerk wanted $145 for the $100 product. What the fuck, please?

REBATE, THAT’S WHAT!

God damn it. How can people sleep at night when their entire contribution to the world is yet another sneaky way to fuck you and me out of the meager money we manage to earn?

I get really mad about this sort of thing.

I pointed and said “Hey aren’t most of the impressionists in the Musee d’Orsay anyway?” and she said “Shut up!” and threw me overboard where I lived happily with the sponges.

I was working in Montgomery, Alabama, where I was raised by people. It was kind of a shitty job, but it was a job. The job’s ad said “Appointment setter” but I didn’t know that that meant “Telemarketer”. It was at a local ISP.

My job was to call people and try to sell them on the idea of an Internet Business Directory, where they would pay to be listed on the internet and people could look them up and buy their crap. It was kind of a dumb idea. I took the job in the first place because I wanted to be part of something technological. It sort of worked, looking back on it, but it didn’t seem too pertinent at the time.

While I was busily shirking away at this job I met a guy who had a late night talk radio show on a local station. He was also the PC repair guy for the place that employed me. He had a van with his PC repair company name printed on the side, and a silhouette of a butler with a computer on a tray. He said he had made sure that the company who painted the silhouette made the butler look like a black man because he was a black and his company was the Computer Butler or something like that. The logic escaped me then, as it does now.

He seemed kind of like a douchebag because he was always hitting on the lesbian lady who worked with me. She tried to explain to him that she was gay, but he kept hitting on her. He confided in me that all she needed was the right man. She was the first lesbian I had known personally, but I still didn’t think she was going to go out with him, mostly because she told when he wasn’t around that he was annoying and full of shit.

He said he needed a sidekick for his radio show, so I said I would come by and try it out. I thought the idea of being on a radio show would be super neat. Maybe I could rise through the ranks of sidekickery and have my own show someday!

I met him at the station late one night and went inside to the studio. His show was really dumb, as most talk shows seem to be, and hardly anyone ever called. I made some jokes from time to time, but they always seemed to annoy him.

In the process of trying to be a good sidekick, however, he and I got into an argument over evolution vs creationism. I was arguing for evolution, and he was countering me with very well thought out mythology and mysticism which supported his fanciful tales of creation. Admittedly, however, I was caught unawares because he had all sorts of quotes ready to back his creationism argument up, and I had merely what I perceive to be common sense. The show ended that night in my frustrating defeat, but I vowed to come back.

The next week I researched my ass off. I printed off chart after chart, page after page, and supporting arguments galore, all while supposedly “setting appointments” for my job. I put them all in a big manilla envelope with the word “EVOLUTION” on it in large sharpie. I took it with me to the next radio show.

He put me off and put me off for the whole show. I kept trying to talk about evolution, but he was having none of it. A few listeners even called to scold him for not letting me talk.

“I’m going to let him have his say, don’t worry.” he told one lady who called.

Finally, as the show was about to end, he said to me “Okay okay, I know you want to talk about this, so let’s get to it.”

I got out all my papers and arguments and got ready to let him have it. Just as I was about to start on my organized defense of evolution, he said “Let me ask you this: Why doesn’t wind have color?”.

I said, “What?”

He said it again. “Why didn’t wind evolve color?”

My mouth hung open. All I could do was stare at him and make little “Uh?” sounds because I was so deeply baffled. To this day, that question is riding high in the top five most unexpected and bizarre things I’ve ever heard.

Well, after the “Wind has color” thing, he didn’t want me to be his sidekick, so that was the end of my talk radio days. He told me I should call the station manager and ask for my own show, so I did.

The station manager had a good laugh at me for asking for a show, and I had the distinct impression that the guy told me to call just so he could have a chuckle with the station manager that a dumbass kid from the suburbs would ask for a talk radio show, so I just hung up.

That guy was a prick.

I was homeless and crazy and my voicemail was overloaded with sobbing and crying and why oh why. I was hiding in Charlotte from home because we were through and it was bad.

There’s always playing, but I was on a break and wandering around the bar looking for a drink. I was pushed to and fro by the masses of people all smiling with wide eyes at one another and talking loudly.

I was glad to have all those people around me even if none of them knew me or cared about me, as though the simple warmth of them around me was like a hug.

I wrote on a napkin “kind of comforting to be around this many people” and stuffed it in my pocket so I would remember to write this later, and now here I am.

The napkin also says “Don’t leave me high, don’t leave me dry”, and at the bottom, “helpless and hurting in the Best Buy like a baby”.

I tried not to be too sad in front of my friend I was staying with because I didn’t want to be a burden, but all I really wanted to do was hide, hide, hide.

Now that I am home and hiding in a hole all by myself I feel like I’m better and now I want to get on with things. This seems to be about the way it works. Sometimes you’re lucky to get over needing something by the time you get it, I guess.

These things happened to me when I broke up with my girlfriend.

If you drink these soft drinks we will have sex with you! No, really! Haha, just kidding, loser.

You know, I find it really bizarre that soft drink companies market their product on the basis of claims of “thirst quenching”, when everyone knows that soft drinks are the last thing you grab when you are really thirsty.

When I am really thirsty, I grab a glass of water. I don’t mean to say that I don’t drink soft drinks because I certainly do. I love a Dr Pepper just as much as anyone else from time to time, but not when I am really thirsty.

The Fantanas pictured above are the evil bringers of thirst, despite their cheery, revealing clothing. Whenever they visit someone in their commercial, the surroundings are all painted in orangey-yellow tones, and everyone is covered in beads of sweat. They demand that everyone drink Fanta to quench their thirst, even chanting “Faster! Faster!” at a guy in a full body cast because he’s not guzzling their product fast enough.

Well, that’s horse shit. I mean, if a soft drink is good and tasty I will drink it, but don’t try to tell me that it quenches thirst because I know better. It’s like trying to sell menthol cigarettes as a breath freshener.

Fantanas, shame on you!