Yesterday, I got an interesting piece of mail. It appeared to be a very colorful and disorganized advertisement at first, but the thing that caught my eye was the silver scratch-off circle on the front.
Of course, there’s no reason for me not to scratch it off, even though I’m near-certain that I’m not going to win, so I reached in my pocket for a coin. And of course, with the great luck that I have, there were no coins in my pocket, so I instead grabbed my keys and attempted to use the flat edge of my apartment key to scratch off the silver cover. That didn’t work out that well.
According to the instructions, if the number that I just scratched off matches the number printed on the inside of the advertisement, then I win. I opened up the advertisement to look for the number.
I wasn’t paying attention to the prizes at first, but seeing as the numbers matched, I decided to look back on the front of the advertisement to find what I won.
I won either $5,000 in cash, an ATV, a $2,500 Walmart gift card, a flat screen television, or $100 in cash.
Itching my head a little bit, wondering how I managed to pull this off, I flipped to the back of the advertisement to see how to claim my prize, and to see if there were any catches that I wasn’t aware of that would prevent me from actually getting my prize.
“Odds of winning; Prizes 1, 2, 4 and 5 are 1:40,000; Prize 3 39,996/40,000 and retail value range from $5 to $2,500.”
At this point, I clearly realized that I missed a very important part of this contest, and that something was amiss. I flipped back to the front of the advertisement to see what the third prize in the list was – the $2,500 Walmart gift card. But how would the retail price of a $2,500 gift card range from $5 to $2,500?
Then I realized my epic mistake. I made a type of mistake that I’m known not to make. I missed a detail.
It wasn’t a $2,500 gift card; it was a gift card,
up to $2,500.
I got trolled by an inanimate object.