Dear Mr. CooperVision,
Thank you for offering me a $100 rebate for purchasing an entire year’s worth of daily contact lenses my ophthalmologist handed to me after my exam as I left her office. That was mighty swell of you.
What I think was less swell were the hoops of fire I had to jump through to mail everything required in order to receive said rebate.
It was a $100 rebate, so of course I was going to follow all of your commandments and do all that you asked of me. For a $99 rebate? Not so much.
In return, I’d like to share with you my experience of what can only be compared to navigating a corn maze at midnight on a foggy September night underneath a cloud-covered sky in my quest for the elusive rebate:
My pupils were still dilated and I couldn’t find my reading glasses which made it difficult for me to read the instructions printed in teeny tiny font on the forms that I was required to follow. (Please see Exhibit A-1 and A-2):
- Exhibit A-2
Had I not been capable of understanding all the steps involved in the rebate process I would have had to hire a CPA, costing me more than the rebate itself.
As a college graduate and mother of two adult children, anxiety forced my pulse to quicken as I began to doubt my competence to fill out the information correctly.
Gasping for air I began to fear what could happen if I made a mistake. Would you refuse to send the rebate? Would you come to my house and repossess my contact lenses, including the ones in my eyes? (Please see exhibit B):
Between my lack of clear vision and the vagueness of the instructions on the paper with font so small a hawk would need to be clutching a magnifying glass in its talons to read them, it was difficult to decipher whether I was required to mail you the proof of purchase for only four boxes, or all eight. Lest I seem delinquent I sent all eight panels and prayed on my knees I wouldn’t be penalized for sending more end panels than necessary, but it was a chance I took. (Please see exhibit C):
If you’ve ever wondered what happens to the boxes once the end panels have been removed and your customer, who by then has contracted a migraine and is attempting to keep a steady hand on the cool washcloth she has slapped onto her forehead and is seriously contemplating whether or not the $100 rebate is worth a panic attack, (Please see exhibit D):
Since I wear contact lenses with specific prescriptions for each eye I wouldn’t have been able to just throw all of those loose strips of lenses into one big, giant Ziploc bag all willy-nilly and call it a day. I knew I would not feel like playing a blurry game of “find the correct lenses” each morning.
In order to keep the two prescriptions separate, I devised two strategies from which to choose: I’d either have to use tape to seal the ends of all eight boxes back together which seemed like an arts & crafts project my brain was too exhausted by then to execute; or I could use two 2-gallon-sized Ziploc bags, labeled left and right, and carefully deposit the left lenses in one and the right lenses in another. (Pease see exhibits E and F):
After performing that Rubik’s Cube of a task, I began to wonder if the eight enclosed end panels combined with the War and Peace amount of paperwork would cause my envelope to be heavier than a regular piece of mail. I really didn’t feel like having to go to the post office to have the albatross of the envelopes weighed.
I thought it best to don my glow-in-the-dark Asics gym shoes (with prescribed, laser-cut orthotics) to help stabilize my stance. Then I slightly bent my knees and braced my core muscles, as I do in yoga and Pilates, and lifted the envelope that included all of the required paperwork, the coupon, and the end panels to see how heavy it was.
Just as the muscles in my arms began to shake, like they do when lifting a bar bell, I dropped the envelope like a body builder drops 300 pounds to the floor causing an unpleasant thud that ripples throughout the entire weight room.
The envelope obviously weighed much more than a typical bill, even more than the one I receive monthly from our often-visited orthopedic doctor’s office. No. This baby was going to receive the full home-remedy treatment: an entire roll of self-stick stamps. It probably didn’t require the whole roll, but the last thing I wanted was this anvil returned to me for lack of sufficient postage. (Please see exhibits G and H):
The most perplexing part of this entire exercise was that as I paid for the contact lenses at my ophthalmologist’s office a notification was sent to you containing all of my personal information, including proof that I paid for eight boxes of contact lenses. Please, Mr. CooperVision, what was the point of having me spend an entire afternoon chasing a rebate the company knew I was owed?
You know what, Mr. CooperVision, if that’s your real name? I don’t think you really want to give out $100 rebates. People with less tenacity might have given up, but not eye. I pushed myself to finish your pointless marathon; I filled out the information you asked for online; I tore off the end panels from all eight packages, thus destroying the boxes; and, yes, I combed my way through the sea of contact lenses strewn about my kitchen table to find the correct contact for each eye and place it in the proper Ziploc bag.
If you really wanted to be nice and give me the $100 rebate, why wasn’t confirmation from my doctor’s office enough? Or, why couldn’t they e mail you a picture of me standing at the doctor’s office holding up the boxes as if I’d won the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes.
I realized that this wasn’t going to bode well for me in the rebate department, so I didn’t publish it on my website until I received the card credited with $100 you claimed would take at least six to eight weeks to process. Just a reminder: I did all of the processing in one afternoon.
Now, on to the next order of business: attempting to mail in a rebate for “Composure,” my dog’s anxiety medicine. I think I’ll chew on a few of them myself before getting started.