4.20.2007

addictions that pay.

i'm not gonna lie. i'm a lucky girl. yeah, yeah...for all the normal reasons like i have an awesome family and i'm lucky to live in a free country and i have a good job and my health (for the most part--but that's another story for another day.) but i'm lucky, just for the sake of being lucky. let me explain.

growing up, saturday was the day we did chores and yard work and stuff around the house...as it probably is in most homes. well, saturday was also the day that if we helped out with the work, my dad would take us to 7-eleven and we would get slurpees. i loved slurpees. i love slurpees. they are heaven sent...you know the saying, "oh thank heaven for 7-eleven." well, it's true. thank heaven. and banana slurpees are the greatest ever made. don't argue with me about this, you will lose.

so, needless to say, i have been enjoying slurpees for a lot of years. thirty, give or take a few...well, actually, take a few. anyway, this last fall, my sister, kristen, got my addiction to slurpees going full steam ahead. (she was far more addicted than i, but she has mostly kicked the habit, so we put off the intervention.) well, after a few weeks of slurpee consumption, we noticed that there were codes on the slurpee cups. it was a contest to win prizes. things like t-shirts, movie tickets, ipod shuffles, nintendo wiis, portable dvd players...just a random selection of prizes. we decided that since we were consuming a plethora of slurpees, we should probably start entering the codes from our cups into the contest.

we were on a mission. i'm not going to tell you how many slurpees were consumed...but i will tell you that we raked in the prizes. oh, i forgot to say that even if you didn't instantly win, you could earn points for each code and then you could "buy" prizes with your points. so, we were able to buy/win 2 t-shirts, many dollars worth of movie tickets and 2 ipod shuffles. well, it turns out that we didn't get actual ipod shuffles, they just sent us these gift cards to buy ipod shuffles. and we sort of got ripped off, because ipod shuffles cost about $80.00 and these cards only have $69.00. but it's okay, we enjoyed every last one of those slurpees.


and the most exciting prize that we won was this nintendo wii. i had just gotten home from a graveyard shift, where i had consumed my delicious slurpee. i went into the computer, entered my code and hit "spin." that's what the little thingy said and then it would spin around and almost every time it would land on "sorry." well, this time it didn't land on "sorry." it landed on the nintendo wii. and then it said congratulations, you have won a nintendo wii.

what the??? this never happens to me. but it did. and that is when i decided that i was a lucky girl.


in january, the slurpee contest ended and that is when i picked up my diet mt. dew addiction. i know, i hadn't been drinking soda for so long, and when i fell off that wagon, i fell hard. but, the pepsi corporation was having a contest and i had to participate. i am a lucky girl. so, i would buy bottles and i would get the codes of the bottle caps and i would enter them on the computer and that was that. no instant winning in the contest and no earning points to "buy" prizes. every now and again i would get a bottle cap that said "buy one, get one free." that was like instant winning and it was enough to keep the addiction going.

then one day, in the mail, i got this letter.


and this check.


pepsi corporation paid me $20.00 for entering a code. i am a lucky girl. but better than getting one check in the mail. i have since received another. that's $40.00, folks.

so, moral of the story...some addictions pay. some pay more than others. but they can pay.

the end.

3 comments:

  1. Ever considered playing the lottery? :) You'd have to move back to Boston to do that!

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  2. so i've been doing some thinking. i've decided that i'm glad to have you around. not only because you're my friend and we were destined to be friends, but because you're lucky. i, my friend, am not lucky. so there's just one more reason for me to hang on to you. yeah. you're stuck with me now. now that your secret is out.

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  3. seriously rachelle...get on the ball. i need to read more of your clever ramblings.

    ReplyDelete