It's so hard. (drive)...

I bought a new hard drive and external case today. It was one of the most complicated transactions in a while.

Yesteday on fatwallet I saw a post that CompUSA was going to have a 160 gig Hitachi hard drive, plus a USB enclosure, for $60 after 3 rebates. I've been thinking about buying an external hard drive for a while. I'm tapped out of IDE controllers right now, but I download a lot of TV shows off the web - ones that aren't on anymore, like Fastlane and Homicide: Life on the Street. I have this GoVideo Network DVD player, which plays them off my computer via a client that runs on my PC and streams them over the network- which means burning them on DVD wouldn't be a very good solution, since I would have to copy them back to my hard drive to stream them.

So I show up at the Towson CompUSA promptly at 10am to make sure I would get one. Which would have been great, except CompUSA opens at 11. I ran another errand (which took me most of the way home) and then drove back to CompUSA at 11. Got hard drive. Discover case isn't firewire, as advertised in the ad, point this out to salesperson, he doesn't care. Decide to buy it anyway. Check out, start driving home. While I'm driving, I'm calculating the rebates and the price I paid, and it seems like I paid too much. Pull over to the side of Charles Street, look at my receipt and the CompUSA ad, and discover that a $15 discount on the hard drive case wasn't applied. Drive back, wait in line behind a guy with the exact same issue, return hard drive case and rebuy at the correct price.

This saga may still not be over - if the rebate center pulls the info from CompUSA's database, it may show the drive case as returned and reject me for the rebate, which means I'll have to fight for the rebate. Grr...