Tales of the midnight comper

Purchase necessary comps aren’t generally on my radar. Partly that’s because I can’t trust the grocery pickers at Tesco to put the right goods in my basket, and partly it’s because I refuse to pay for something that I have no intention of consuming. Case in point: I wouldn’t touch high-caffeine energy drinks if I was dying of thirst (I know, my body’s a temple, right?) so I’m hardly going to fill a trolley with them.

Sometimes, of course, such bloody mindedness serves only to spite myself. Consider, for example, the Walker’s Snap & Share comp from 2017. All I needed was one bag - one! - and I could have been off to watch Champions League football or playing Pro Evolution Soccer on one of the 500 PlayStation 4 consoles they were giving away. Instead, I just waited to womble a packet, by which time there was about a fortnight left to enter. Sure, I won an adidas football (and it was the best football I’ve ever won), but imagine if I’d pulled my pointlessly principled finger out?!

Here, I can only paraphrase Beverly Knight: what-ifs are for chumps. The only sensible thing to do is to thank Mr Walker for my ball and move on.

Moving on from what might have been is easy enough, but what might yet be is another matter. In this regard, I’ve had a change of heart. It’s not just that I’ve been spending so long on Instagram that I fancied a change, but also because there has recently been such a glut of prize-heavy instant win promotions that I’d have been an utter mug to turn my nose up.

The most obvious example is the recent Ribena Pick Your Own Gig promotion, through which my wife and I were blessed with more than a dozen bottles of Ribena and a few quids’ worth of Amazon vouchers. To be sure, I missed out on the biggies, but a score of soft drinks is always handy in summer.

I also found the Ribena comp to be a bunch more generous than the Lucozade Born to Move promotion, which I’ve entered religiously and won two prizes: one last year and one this year. I say “won” but the “free bottle of Lucozade” came in the form of a voucher that I had a fortnight to redeem and wasn’t accepted at any major supermarket. It also didn’t cover the full cost of the product, so for two years running it has cost me fourpence to purchase my prize. And I don’t even like Lucozade.

But that’s by the by. More important is the fact that I’m a terrible sleeper. At best, I’ll wake up some time around 3 am and then some time annoyingly close to my wife’s alarm going off, then again when the alarm actually goes off, and again when she actually gets out of bed. Come the weekend, the alarm clock gets put on ice for a couple of days so that the children can wake me up at a similar time instead. Weeknights, my wife will still be working by the time I go to bed, so the odds of me waking up when she turns in are pretty good too. On top of this, one of our children is currently midway through a season of wee-hour nosebleeds and bed-wetting through which it is unacceptable to sleep. And did I mention the gurgling of the radiators? Yeah, that too.

Now, when it comes to winning moment competitions, it’s often said that there are good times to enter, and there are bad. Bad is the peak time - daytime, especially lunchtime and other down times; good is when anyone in their right mind is asleep. And since sleep deprivation has contributed less than nowt to my comping, I figured it was about time for it to start pulling its weight. To this end, I decided to try small-hour comping.

For the first month or so, my success was limited to the Walkers/Pepsi Perfect Match promotion, from which I won a plastic bowl and a couple of tumblers, one of which had got smashed in the mail. To be sure, wins on this scale fall under the umbrella of tiny acorn rather than great oak; however (and more importantly), they also bear out the theory that moonlight comping can indeed bring grist to the mill.

But why settle for grist when there are bigger fish out there, just crying out to be fried? Fish by the name of Freddo’s Big Adventure and Dairylea Super Cool or Super Cheesy.

Why these two? Well, I’d like to say it was because of the prizes, but actually it was because the entry mechanic involved keying in a barcode rather than a unique code, so they required the smallest outlay.

Shining blue light into my face when I should have been KO took about a week to pay dividends: Freddo, bless him, chucked a couple of GoApe tickets my way, while the benevolently bonkers gods of Dairylea endowed me with a Polaroid instant print camera, which for some reason they classified as a cheesy prize, lumping it in with the karaoke kits and Dairylea onesies.

It's not cheesy - it's awesome!

For the absence of doubt, I mean no disrespect to Dairylea, but giving away 150 cameras on top of 100 Samsung tablets, 100 Bose speakers and 100 bikes is definitely bonkers. And - unlike with the Freddo or, for that matter, Foster’s Thirstiest Place on Earth comps - the Dairylea T&C don’t specify a limit on the number of times you can enter each day, meaning that sweat shops full of cheese-wielding comp-mongers are no doubt tapping away 24/7 in the hope of bagging a giant Jenga set.

Speaking of Foster’s, I also won a chiller disk at about 5 am today, so it looks like my bleary-eyed endeavour will be continuing a while longer.

Is that really wise, though? Wee-hour wins taste just as great as their daytime counterparts, but much like the house creaks so much louder at night, so too is the winning buzz amplified. Just try grabbing that shut-eye when you’re still high on that sweet dopamine-adrenaline combo!

The question then is what price a good night’s sleep? For a £150 camera, I’m happy to spend the next day as a crotchety growl-bag. The only thing is, in my twilight stupor I thought I’d won something else - a (genuinely cheesy) disposable camera. Not something that most people would toss and turn the rest of the night over. But then again, maybe people should take more pleasure from not being on the wrong side of a four-penny mugging.

Have you tried small-hours comping? How has it worked out for you? Let me know in the comments below!