My Instinct Was Wrong? Right!

After reading this – please read my latest post on the matter!

Even our much hyped Appliance Rebate Program – Energy Efficiency Powerful Smart for Texans.

The State announced this program several months ago. It’s purpose is to entice Texans to buy new Energy Star appliances with over $20 million in rebates using money from the U.S. Governement.

This program has been hyped up to coincide with Earth Day, April 25. Consumers can “reserve” up to two rebates per household on various qualifying appliances from dishwashers, washers, hot water heaters, refrigerators, air conditioners and heat pumps.

After being postponed, consumer reservations started today April 7 via a toll free number or their website. Purchases of the qualifying appliance have to be done during the 10 day period from April 16 – April 25, 2010 (Earth Day).

Perfect! We need a new washer – have for a few months now, but we’ve been putting up with the 12 year old leaking beast waiting to take advantage of this program.

We’re still not sure which model we’ll buy, but a new washer is $500 minimum – the rebate is $180 – that’s a 36% savings. Add in the $75 recycling fee available and it’s now over 50% savings – well worth the hassles of waiting. See, everything is BIGGER in Texas!!

Reservations started today at 7 am. I’ve been trying to get through to the website since 7:02 am and have been calling the toll free number constantly since 7:30 am.

According to their Twitter page

“Unprecedented high traffic”, “high volume”

I’m not really sure what they expected, but obviously they are under-prepared. I’m sure the various phone companies, both land based and cellular appreciate this program too.

It’s 3 hours later and I still do not have our reservation. The only time I have been able to get a page to load did offer some hope though – of the over $20 million available, I was just able to see that only 3% of it had been reserved – only $19 mil to go!

So as you can see Everything is NOT bigger in Texas – at least not the phone system and web server infrastructure to support this program nor the Texas State Government’s ability to foresee this coming – given all the hype leading up to this event, like a parade up Main St., it should have been hard to miss.

On a side note – I learned a long time ago that “Absolutes are always wrong” – the word “everything” is an absolute, so I guess I should have known.

UPDATE: 11:22 am – well, it’s been almost 4.5 hours now with me constantly trying the website and the phone # with no success. Their twitter page only wants to discuss how many hits and phone calls they are getting. The website has been taken down twice now, and currently just goes in circles – I get the main page to load – click the link to get my washer rebate reservation and after several minutes, I end up back on the main page that I was just on.

$255 in 5 hours would equate to $51 per hour – this is rapidly becoming a losing proposition considering I can’t get any of my normal work done.

The options given since the website is “temporarily unavailable” are to call, watch them on twitter, and sign up for email updates – all of which I have done or am still doing – all of which get me no closer to my rebate reservation.

When I do get something other than a busy signal, it’s a recording of a rather annoying female voice saying “We are experiencing unusually high call volumes, please try your call again later. Goodbye”

Someone is obviously getting through as we’re now up to 10% of the funds reserved.

can you say FUBAR?

UPDATE: 12:30 pm
I’ve gotten to the captcha screen several times but can’t get past that until now. And my wife just called and said she was able to get through. So, I stopped entering the info for the washer rebate since she was gong to do that one. We also want to purchase a 2nd refrigerator, so I’ll start over and try that one.

I think probably this whole process would have been more efficient if they had required us to drive to Austin and stand in line single file out in the blazing sun until we got up to the front to reserve our rebate in person.

UPDATE: IN THE END
Wow, what a joke. after trying for another hour, I was not able to get into the system quick enough to get an actual rebate reservation for the frig. I was able to get on the waiting list for that. My wife gets home and we check her email – no email from the state regarding the washer rebate – ugh. So now we’re not even sure if we got that – which was the whole point of this futlie excercise in the first place.