I‘VE READ THAT SOMETHING LIKE 80 percent of the people eligible for rebates on purchases of new appliances, computers, even automobiles, faced with the irritating paperwork involved in collecting the money, adapt what are supposed to have been W.C. Fields’s deathbed words and say, On second thought, screw ’em, and walk away in defeat. Not me. I’m determined they aren’t going to cheat me. I think of myself as neither a running dog nor a jackal of capitalism, but a fox out to get all the system has to offer. As such I’m not about to let its trickier practitioners pull the wool over my toes, not in this life, buddy boy, they won’t.
“Du calme,” Old Fox, I say to myself, pen poised above the formidable not-yet-filled-out rebate papers before me, “du calme.” This is the advice for survival the physician in Brussels gives to Joseph Conrad’s main man Marlow before he plunges into the heart of darkness that was the Belgian Congo.
I now plunge into my rebate-coupon paperwork. I carefully check the box next to the name of my new computer printer on which I’m applying for my rebate. I print in my name and address with a steady hand and an impressive clarity in which I take much delight. Not to seem uncooperative or otherwise a cold or remote person, I check Yes in the boxes that will allow the company to send me further information about other of their products, and even agree to sharing “customer information with the sellers where you purchased the product.” Hey, I want them to know that I’m a sharing, caring kind of guy, but at the same time would like to find a way to establish that I’m not someone to be trifled with.
At first the mail-in rebate checklist seems straightforward enough. They want the rebate coupon-form filled out. Already done: check. They want the original receipt for my purchase or a copy of it. I’ve got it right here on my desk: check. They want the original UPC and serial number of the product, which I’ve already cut off the box: check. They want, for some reason, my mother’s maiden name, which banks sometimes ask for, too. No problem. I write in “Abrams.” Check yet again.
Things are going fairly smoothly, but then I am brought up a bit when they want to know the name of the first boy my mother went out with in high school. I’d heard these guys can play rough. Only this time the Fox happens to be ready for them. I recall my mother telling me that the first boy she went out with at John Marshall High School on the west side of Chicago in 1925, when she was 15, was Sidney Silverman (alliteration here is a great aid to memory), who later in life made a bundle in used auto parts. He bought her a wrist corsage and took her to a dance at the Palmer House. I hear trumpets sound dimly but triumphantly in the background as I print out Sidney’s full name.
The next item on the list asks for dental X-rays and a small sample of hairs from my head to be placed in a Ziploc bag. I pull out a few of my ever-sparser hairs and insert them in a plastic bag, and make a note to call in the morning Dr. Primack’s hygienist Pat, who just acquired a bichon frise pup named Myron, about whose health I must remember to inquire. I’m not sure about the dental X-rays, but I assume that they want the hairs to check out my DNA, for rebates have by now been in business long enough to attract scam artists and maybe they want to make sure I’m not one of them. Okay. I can live with that.
Things start to get sticky with the next item, which asks for a liver biopsy, which really seems to me pushing it. It’s less than clear whether they want the actual tissue or a report on a biopsy. I’m assuming the report. In any case, I’m in luck, for I have had such a procedure within the past three months. I make another note to check with Jim Rosenberg, my gastroenterologist, in the morning. But why, exactly, do you suppose they want a liver biopsy? I have no notion but feel fortunate that they didn’t ask for a lung or kidney biopsy. These guys play hardball.
As I read the final item, a dark cloud forms before my eyes. I fight off fainting. They ask for my foreskin–I mean, my actual flamin’ foreskin–though there are no instructions about how to package it. (For women, an asterisk footnote says, they will accept a maidenhead.) I was circumcised 68 years ago. Could I, I wonder, fake it, slip a fresh one, sort of antiqued up, by them? But where would I get it? For the first time in my entire life I regret not knowing a mohel. Maybe . . . or maybe. . . . And then, maybe. . . . Crumpling up the almost-filled-out rebate coupon in my hand, I hear the plaintive voice of W.C. Fields, “On second thought, screw ’em,” and now the Old Fox, too, retires in defeat.
–Joseph Epstein
