Shelley won a trip for two to Paris!
She's been talking about this for weeks... and I maintained my usual "realistic" (negative) attitude. The same attitude I was using for the recent Powerball craze... which Shelley and her co-workers dumped about $300 (or more) on...
So I'm over at Matt's house watching UFC on PPV, and I get a phone call from Shelley's phone, and it's Darcy yelling that "Shelley won the trip to Paris"... and I was immediately skeptical. "Yeah, sure she did..." Shelley gets on the phone all out of breath and convinced me that she wasn't lying, and that she had to go because they were taking pictures and doing interviews and stuff. Now she has to go to the radio station on Monday for another interview.
So how cool is that?
Another thing I have to report is a warning to all you unsuspecting Internet newbies. This is a true statement in general, but it's even doubly true on the 'net. "If the offer sounds too good, it probably is...".
One day, around May 10th or so, I saw a banner add for a FREE PLAYSTION PORTABLE! I've been resisting buying one of these for a while, because I just couldn't justify the cost. It truly was nothing more than a toy, and all the little gadgets I already have do the tasks that I was trying to convince myself (mostly) that I could use it for: previewing digital images, portable storage... etc. Even I wasn't convinced; how could I convince Shelley?
So I saw this banner advertisement, and figured I'd just check it out. It works like this: You are shown three pages of several different offers. You must choose 2 offers from each page. When you complete the requirements for each of the offers (buy something, sign up for something, etc), you'll be given the green light and will fill out a "form" to have the gift sent to you. However, at the bottom of the form it states:
(company name) reserves the right to: a) substitute any gift item with another of similar functionality
(including a working model that has been used/refurbished) b) substitute any gift item with another of
similar value c) send a member the cash equivalent of the gift item.
I did the math, and with everything I signed up for, the immediate cost is close to $200, and the cost for all the monthly charges that I will incur if I continue to use all the services I signed up for will be over $750. A new PSP costs about $250, and these jerkoffs are already telling me that they "reserve the right" to give me something else if they deem it plausible.
None of the offers that I accepted are things that I wouldn't have bought anyway (Vonage, Netflix), so it's not so much the overall cost that's bugging me. It's the fact that it's already been a month before I "met the requirements", even though 5 of the 6 offers have been reported as completed since the day AFTER I started all this. Only one of them took over three weeks to be "reported"... I'm also extremely bugged by the fact that I may not even get what I was aiming for...
Lesson learned here? Nothing is free...
Well, I had a few more things to report, but I can't think of them right now (too tired), and they probably weren't that interesting anyway... I'll try posting again in a couple days if I remember...
Love to all,
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