Question on sending for a rebate

In My Humble Opinion
1

This isn’t geared for GQ and it’s partially an opinion question so I’m putting it here.

I have a coworker, well boss actully who knows I’m very good when it comes to computers. Her son had an external harddrive by Maxtor which fell off a desk onto the floor. She asked me if I could recover any of the data.

Unfortunatly it was dead. The head would click but thats it. I tried spinning the rive by hand to overcome stickson, I tried freezing the drive nothing at all. I did this after removing the drive from the enclosure.

I told her the enclosure still worked and any IDE hard drive would work in it. She didn’t feel comfortable putting a drive in herself and she didn’t want her son to touch it so she asked me to look into buying a drive for her and she would pay me for the drive and my time.

I found a 300GB Maxtor which was 100GB more than the original drive on sale at CompUSA for 99.00 after rebate. I was going to sell her the drive for what I paid and then let her send in the rebate but now I don’t know if I can do that because the rebate forms says you can’t assign or transfer the rebate.

So if she can’t send in for the rebate do I send it in myself and charge her the difference between what I paid and the amount I am getting back from the rebate, or do I charge her the full amount and when I get the rebate give it to her?

Something that clouds the issue more is I do have a computer support business but by virtue of being a state employee I am not allowed to solicit personal work on state time or property so this repair is being done on a friend to friend basis and not involving my business at all. (The boss is friends with my mother from a long time ago)

2

My opinion is to charge her the non-rebate amount, and when the rebate comes in, hand it over to her. My luck with rebates is notoriously bad, and it would suck to get stuck with a 100 dollar loss because you did your boss a favor.

However, if you bought the product with cash, and you bought it on her behalf, I wonder if you might still be rightfully able to let her use the rebate anyway. I say with cash because a credit card receipt would likely have some sort of identifying information on it, which might make things look questionable but I could be wrong on that, too.

3

Charge her full boat and when (and only when) the rebate arrives offer to give her the amount in cash. Do not get her expecting a rebate if one does not materialze.

I’m mostly out of PC fix it mode at this point, but quite frankly if I wasn’t charging for the retrieival attempts-disassembly-install-setup-reassembly etc (I’m estimating 2-3 hours or so all told) but only the drive itself I’d consider the rebate mine in lieu of my fee as long as the customer is OK wth this. Given the pushups you are doing to help her you should be perfectly entitled to the rebate.