Rick's b.log - entry 2016/03/20

Competition trolling for the lulz

A girl from production came into the break room to drink from the water dispenser. So I asked her:

Tell me... One of the Breizh cola bottles contains a sticker for winning the prize. The prize being two tickers to watch a football match.

She nodded, looked at the bit of paper taped to the machine, and said that she saw it earlier before she began her shift.

So, tell me. One bottle wins, right? Well there are four bottles in the machine. They cost eighty centimes each. What's to stop somebody spending three twenty, buying all four, and thus winning the prize?

Do you like football?

Oh yes.

Three euros twenty, it's yours.

...

...

J'ai du monnaie!

The third bottle rolled out. And by now it was quite clear that the winning sticker was on the final bottle. I'm neither a smart ass nor prescient. It was utterly predictable.

And moments later, the final bottle rolled out. The girl tore the paper off the machine and walked away with it and the four bottles of cola, obviously pleased that she got tickets to a football match for an easy three euros twenty.

Really.
That was utterly dumb. Having a prize on one of only four products. And the fact that it's probably been like that all morning and nobody else thought to "just buy all the bottles".

Now, there may be people among you wondering why I didn't win myself the tickets.
The answer is boarding school. I was always the second to last person picked (the last person was crippled so this was no compliment), I was always stuck in goal, and the worst thing of all, the PE teacher obviously favoured the "blue" team. I was "red", we were called "Sampson" and the others were called "Hercules", though we reds tended to refer to the teams as Sampson and Delilah. Anyway, he favoured the blue team and if us lot of hopeless cases should actually manage to put in a reasonable game and come within a hair of actually winning, out would come some obscure rule more or less made up on the spot to ensure that Blue Always Wins. Accordingly, Blue Always Won because we reds didn't try very hard. What was the point? Then we get to the money earned by football players that are well known and play in the televised matches. How can anybody possibly justify pay like that when junior doctors (in fact most of the NHS below comfy-admin level) get peanuts? What's more important, kicking a ball around a field or routinely making sick and broken people better again (or, at least, trying to)?
As such, my feelings towards football are mostly antagonistic.
In short, you couldn't GIVE me tickets to watch a football match. I would rather sit and stare at my rice maker. Even if it was empty.

I'm glad that a person that likes the game "won" the tickets, I do hope she'll have a nice day. And think of me while she's there. Of course, if she hadn't taken the rather obvious bait, then I would have bought all of the bottles myself. Made them disappear. And not claimed the prize. That would work too.

Purely for the lulz, of course...

And a little video for you...

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Gavin Wraith, 21st March 2016, 10:49

Rick, you may have already read of my dislike of all organized sport (and particularly football) on my website at http://www.wra1th.plus.com/gcw/mem/whs.txt . That others should enjoy it is fine, but the media-saturation is tiresome. One has to distinguish two kinds of "sport": 1) doing it - probably healthy in moderation, 2) spectating it, reading about it, talking about it - a mentally unhealthy vicarious habit. We need to get away at times from serious matters - dulce est desipere in loco. But football mania seems depressingly empty-minded to me.

VinceH, 21st March 2016, 20:31

Football could be improved: http://misc.vinceh.com/2010/06/how-to-improve-the-game-of-footba ll/

Rick, 25th March 2016, 22:09

The follow up to this is about as ridiculous as the story itself...  Right, so the woman won and she had a little sticker that said "Winner" (well, "GAGNE" or something like that). She feeled it off the bottle and brought it in.    ...for the people at work handling the competition to refuse to give her the prize as the sticker is apparently supposed to be attached to the bottle.  Unfortunately for the woman: 1, she drank the cola and threw the bottles away afterwards; and 2, she removed (and later threw away) the information paper announcing the competition. The latter would have been "the final word" on whether the sticker was sufficient on its own (the the people at work are just being jobsworths), or whether it does need to be stuck to the empty bottle.  So, the woman has the sticker. Nobody has a bottle.   And the prize is likely going to not be given despite two witnesses that saw her receive the winning bottle from the machine AND she has the winning sticker.    Yeah. Go rub your head. It's one of those sorts of stories.

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