I suck at football. I suck in so many ways, you can’t even count them - and believe me, people have tried. I suck so bad, I even suck at spectating. But that’s OK - my son thinks I’m Maradona on the field, but then he’s six, and I can still dispossess him without resorting to (excessive) barging.
The sorry thing is, I do like football. I’m just not built for it. Heck, I’m not even built for football apparel - the recent developments vis-à-vis slim-fit shirts has not combined well with recent developments vis-à-vis this man’s middle-age midriff, and it’s only due to the stress of lockdown that I’ve dropped enough timber to get back into the last top I won.
All that, however, is by the by. A few weeks back, Sure was encouraging Joe Public to show off their lockdown football skills by chipping a ball into some household receptacle or another. The prize was a Chelsea shirt signed by the first XI - and in case you’re not into the whole beautiful game thing, that’s damn sweet.
As it happens, refining one’s skills is only half the task - finding a suitable pitch and camera angle in your average terraced house is easier said than done - especially for someone like me who is as likely to smack the ball into their phone as the laundry basket.
Nevertheless, I set the stage and scored the shot. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but as any striker will tell you, they all count. And count it did - out of a field of less than a dozen, my silly shot was apparently judged to be the best. For the first time in my life, my soccer skills had netted a win, and the second-born was once more in awe of his old man’s flair play.
So far, so excellent, but I’d scarcely had time for a celebratory cup of tea and a sit-down when Pukka Pies launched a similar lockdown soccer comp. Normally, of course, I am awful at recycling my endeavours - not least because my filing technique is so poor. On this occasion, however, I barely had to scroll through my phone to find the right clip. Fate or blind luck, I’ll let you be the judge, suffice to say that barely a handful of people fulfilled the entry criteria for this one either, and thanks to my action replay I poked a second one into the onion bag.
The short man was again delighted - not just because it’s great to have such a winner as a dad (I know, I know) - but also because we got a brand-spanking football and fridge full of pie. There was also the matter of the apron and water bottle, but since they were neither pie nor football, they passed him by.
What also passed him by were the takeaways from this performance - so in true pundit style, here they are:
If the opposition don’t turn up, the game’s yours for the taking.
If you’ve got something in the locker - use it.
Football’s a game of two halves, but there’s nothing to stop them being identical. (Which is another way of saying the previous point)
Goals win games. (Which is another way of saying the bleeding obvious)
Oh, and always give 110% (Which is another way of saying complete nonsense)
Yep, it's been a while. What can I say - I dipped out ... but then I dipped in again! Please excuse my, erm, deliberate error towards the end - the Walker's-Pepsi promotion is of course Perfect Match, not Match and Win ... oops!
It's back! Yes, I know I haven't done an unboxing for a few months, but things have been quiet, and who wants to watch tumbleweed, right? This month has been a much better ride on the win wagon - in addition to the prizes herein, I've also had a win on the Malteaser bunny Daring Days Out comp.
I also want to give a special shout out to two of my local comping buddies who have been entering the Cadbury's Premier League comp on behalf of my lad, with the result that Davina has won him a MASSIVE heap of stickers, and Oriana is sending me to watch Norwich v Everton in a few weeks time - THANK YOU SO MUCH!
But enough chat - enjoy the video ... and be lucky!
In January, I mostly won stickers. Actually, I only won stickers. Hundreds of them. More than I’ve bought in my entire life. In itself, that’s hardly surprising - I’ve never been a completist: I got two-thirds of the way through my ET album, one-third through my Return of the Jedi album, and no more than a dozen stickers into any of the Smash Hits albums. That’s the trouble when you’re too tight to pay out - the desire for closure doesn’t so much fade as surrender to the economic imperative.
My first-born is currently hovering around this point. He was all into his Norwich City album while people were gifting him stickers, but nothing on God's earth was going to make him lift a finger to earn the money for more.
The younger one, however, enjoys greater indulgence - to which end, this season alone has brought him not only Norwich City stickers, but also Match Attax Champions League cards, Panini Premier League cards and Panini FIFA365 cards, all of which he files carefully according to no system whatsoever, all over his floor.
100 packets of Panini stickers: more than any rational human would ever need AND THEY ARE ALL MINE!
And yes, to this heap he will shortly be adding the 100 packets of Panini Premier League stickers I won from Cadbury the other night.
This ton-box of stickers is, if you like, the entry-level prize. These boxes are currently retailing on Amazon for upwards of sixty quid and Cadbury is giving away two thousand of them. So, as entry-level prize pools go, this one carries a soupcon more swag than the tsunami of drawstring bags and keyrings that Cadbury has given away on previous occasions.
The next prize tier, naturally, is even grander: the album plus complete set of stickers - in other words, the finished article.
ALL THE STICKERS! ALL OF THEM!
For some people, a prize like this would be off the scale of insane. I, however, am conflicted. I mean, there’s no doubt that these sticker-books are legit rackets - case in point, the last Panini World Cup album would have cost a bare minimum of £109 to complete, assuming you bought 137 packets without a single duplicate, but more likely pushing £400 - and more still if you had no mates to swap with.
And yet! It’s the heat of desire; the thrill of the trades; the satisfaction of completing a page, a team or even an album.
It’s all about the experience.
A completed album, straight off-the-shelf, is an artefact devoid of emotional journey. To be sure, there’s mindfulness to be found in fastening millionaires to boxes, but in terms of experience, it’s like studying the Skywalker family tree before watching Star Wars for the first time.
Comping’s not so different. Yes, the prizes are nice, but sometimes they account for such a small fraction of the experience that you start questioning why you bother. This is why you’ve got to enjoy the ride. As my dad regularly used to say, sometimes it’s better to travel than to arrive.
There are many paths to happiness, and so far in 2020, this one I’ve barely trod. The fact that I’ve still managed to win something, however, is a nice reminder that it’s OK to take it easy. There’ll be plenty more when the time is right.
Winning’s nice. Makes you feel all warm, doesn’t it? A few days ago, I won a Gleam comp. That’s not something that happens every day. To be honest, for me, it’s not even something that happens every year. But happen it did, and that's what's important.
It also happened to be my biggest prize of the year too - a PS4.
Getting a winning notification like that is the kind of thing that makes you jump out of your seat and squeal, as indeed I would have, had the great dollop of offspring occupying my lap at that moment not cut off the blood-flow to my legs. But restraint has its own rewards: while a few muffled squarks might not be quite as cathartic as a squeal, they don't result in an hour of what-is-it-and-can-i-have-it earache from your weans. Which also is nice.
For some people, of course, a games console is a fundamental utility. My brother in law, for example, owns every major console produced since ever, and would rather have his water disconnected than be denied access to his tech-babies.
Me, less so. I’ve acclimatised. It’s about 15 years since I bought my last proper gaming device as I’ve frankly been unable to justify the outlay.
For this reason, I’ve had PlayStations, Xboxes and the like on my comping wishlist for, well, since first getting my act together and making a wishlist, actually. And as my children have been growing up, I’ve been thinking, gawsh … It won't be long before I’m going to have to spend actual folding money on one of these doohickeys or they - like me - will risk dropping out of the cultural loop. I know, first-world problems, right?
To be sure, dropping out of the cultural loop isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Case in point: I don’t think me banning them from watching the X-Factor is going to compromise their prospects in life. That said, I also suspect that the X-Factor does little to improve reaction time, problem-solving skills, multi-tasking or hand-eye co-ordination.
There’s also the fact that the video games sector now accounts for more than half of the UK’s entire entertainment market, so there’s worse career options out there.
The thing is though, for all I’ve been wanting to immerse my kids in this world of infinite exciting possibilities, my understanding of the field has shrivelled to the point of imbecility. The winning notification didn’t tell that I’d won a PS4; rather, it told me I’d won a PS4 Pro or an Xbox One something or other, and then asked which I wanted. They may as well have asked my cat whether it preferred Visa or Mastercard.
Fortunately, the extremely well informed Nikki Hunter-Pike stepped up to the plate at short notice and made my decision for me (Thank you Nikki!).
I thought that was it, and spent a minute feeling all smug about my win, but then the promoter pinged back, asking what game I wanted, which - to revert to the previous analogy - was like asking my cat whether Facebook’s Libra is really a cryptocurrency or just a global digital currency based on blockchain technology. So, again, thank you Nikki for selecting something on my behalf - I look forward to playing once the advents are out of the way!
Until then, however, I will be thrashing the guts out of my comping engine. That’s not just because of the base comping orgy that is December, but also because big wins are so emboldening. Or, to put it another way, they stop you being able to think straight.
The comps on Prizefinder and the Competition Database will have been entered by thousands of people. I know that. Yet what was the first thing I did, after winning the console? Enter every damn holiday and big tech comp listed. Because you got to be in it to win it, right?
Well, yes. In a sense. But wouldn’t time be better spent hunting for better leads and smaller odds?
Whether it’s comping or poker or playing the horses, there’s a reason why the wiseguys do so well - they maintain their game and don’t turn into headless chickens at the first whiff of success. There’s also a reason why I’m not a wiseguy…
Things don’t always go according to plan. That’s not to say they’ve gone wrong, of course; it’s just that the outcome, the journey, or possibly both, have diverged from expectation. Parenthood is a case in point. Well, sort of: parenthood is a largely thankless travail where anything and everything you do will be criticised by someone at some point, and the only way your predictions will pan out is if you expect to balls up everything in the first place. But still, just because you’re permanently in the wrong, that doesn’t mean that the whole thing has been a catastrophe. (It’ll still feel like it, sure, but legally speaking, only a small minority of cases are unequivocally catastrophic.)
In terms of prizes, for example, it was barely a fortnight ago that my coffee turned up a few months late, but buddied up with another half-pound friend. Likewise, today, my biggest win of the year pretty much doubled in size thanks to an admin error.
How so? Well, just before Instagram called time on its ‘following’ tab, I found a small-odds competition to win a case of reds from the Sunday Times Wine Club. Within a week of pulling my name from the hat, a dozen bottles turned up at my house. The only problem - and let’s be quite clear, this really wasn’t a problem - was that these weren’t the bottles I was supposed to have won.
Mindful of the fact that someone had kindly just given me a hundred quid’s worth of wine, I most definitely did not complain.
What I did do, however, was thank the promoter, but point out that the bottles weren’t the ones I was expecting, and that while this was absolutely not an issue for me, I didn’t want one of their paying customers to be upset because they were waiting for the box on my hallway floor.
The thing is, while I did prefer the look of the original prize, most promoters reserve the right to substitute prizes, in part or whole, with an alternative of equal or greater value - and I’m cool with that. Had the promoter offered to replace the wine, I would have been happy; had they not, I would still have been happy.
12 of the best
What I was not expecting, however, was for the promoter to say, hold up, that ain’t right - tell you what, hang on to that box and we’ll send you the proper one right away. Truthfully, I’m still rather taken aback. I mean, if things had gone to plan, I’d have been able to stick all the booze in the cupboard under the stairs. As it happens, I now have a dozen bottles of sauce obstructing the passage through my kitchen. But then, some problems are nice to have, aren’t they?
Children and noise go hand in hand - everyone knows that. Likewise, it’s hardly a secret that said noise increases exponentially, the more children you add to the mix. Some people are blessed – it washes over them. Not me, however – I’m literally allergic. The consecutive (and indeed concurrent) episodes of shrieking from one child or the other have overexcited my senses such that I’m now clinically intolerant of even their tiniest squawk.
Being unable to abide the incessant clanking and slurping of children at mealtimes is nothing unusual; however, the fact that I now have a doctor’s note to excuse me from the table, does rather set me apart.
These days, my happy place would be inside an immersion tank guarded by Benedictine librarian mice. And yet it was not ever thus. Indeed, there was a time when all my spare time and pennies were devoted to music. Once the small things found their lungs, however, things changed.
At first, I didn’t notice how much I was cowering from their hullaballoo. It started with simply switching off the radio so I didn’t have to suffer the blather, and before long, not playing anything during the day as I knew I’d only be hauled out of the room to wipe another backside or resolve another fight. Eventually, it got to the point that I’d simply forget to turn on my music at all. Night after night, I’d sit in unnecessary silence – not even noticing the peace, never mind enjoying it. Come birthdays and Christmas, people would give me new CDs that I’d rinse for a couple of weeks, but somehow, it was never enough to relight my fire. The silence would always prevail.
The solution was of course simple: if you want mobile music, plug in your headphones. If you want to block out the noise of your issue, plug in your headphones. If you want to listen to music uninterrupted, plug in your headphones.
Unfortunately, I’ve not been blessed with smarts these last few years and it took me a while to work this out. Don’t all judge me at once.
The real clincher in this regard was winning a pair of wireless headphones. That they were officially noise-cancelling too got me extra excited. To be fair, so “noise-cancelling” doesn’t mute children quite as much as I’d like, but at least I can no longer hear them from the other side of the county.
More to the point, thanks to these cans, I’m finally able to offer my ears shelter-in-place without leaving the auditory blast area. This means I’ve started listening – actually listening – to music again. It’s like finding a nugget of my soul down the back of the sofa.
Or it was. Last night they went Pop. Sproing. Or whatever noise you might imagine a piece of tech might make when it bursts open FOR NO GOOD REASON.
I mentioned this to the promoter. They oohhed and they ahhed and they said it was definitely odd.
But no replacement will be forthcoming. Their best offer was 25% off a new pair.
It’s a nice discount, to be sure, but when your experience with a product is that it self-combusts before you’ve even used it a dozen times, you feel a little reticent to renew it. Or is that just me?
Thankfully, I do have some other headphones that I can plug in and please my ears - a gift from someone I met because of our shared interest in this deliciously niche hobby. And for this reason I say Thank You Davina - My sanity is in your hands!
I’m regularly touched by the generosity I see in this community and can’t wait to meet more of you later this year!
A relatively quiet month as far as unboxing goes, but I did also win a pair of tickets to watch Ruby Wax in a couple of weeks time, along with a download code for a videogame. I've definitely had worse months!
I won watches. Fancy watches. His & Hers fancy watches. They’re made by Mr Jones Watches, and they’re utterly bonkers.
Hand-made in London with a self-winding mechanism, on the face of it, there’s nothing half-cocked about these timepieces - unless you’re looking for some kind of instrument with which to measure the passage of time with any degree of accuracy.
It’s worth noting that the last time I had to consult the instructions for a wristwatch I was six. In that respect, this win has given me an exquisitely novel way to relive my childhood that doesn’t entail wrestling with the hourly chime on a plastic Casio.
While it’s not the first time someone has designed a wristwatch with neither numbers nor hands, this has to be one of the most bonkersest designs yet. It’s like someone copped a snook at the entire history of timekeeping and thought, nah - I’ve got a much better idea.
I’m going to level with you here: it’s not a practical solution. If you’re the type of person who keeps time through quick, furtive glances at their watch, then you’d hate these.
On the other hand, if you want a wrist ornament that demands contemplation before it yields the vaguest insight into matters horological, then this is the stuff of dreams.
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.
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!
July has been hot! Not just literally, but in terms of wins too. I've been aberrationally successful, for which I'm endlessly grateful, and bracing myself for a super-drought as the world realises its error and the cosmic balance lurches back into place.
Possibly the first step in this regard was one of my prizes smashing before I got the chance to use it. Fortunately, it was only a small bottle of serum, but frustrating nonetheless.
Also, despite what I say in this video, the coat *is* the one I asked for - I just got muddled with the one I'd ordered for my other son! As for the football, I can confirm that the signatures are from regular civilians whose celebrity is based entirely on the fact that they happen to have the same name as someone else.
Most of my July wins are in this month's unboxing video. The largest, however, I'm saving for a forthcoming post as it really was rather cool...
The FIFA World Cup used to be the cornerstone of my life. I got together with my other half during the 1998 tournament, and exactly four years later, we were married. Another four years on and we were still gorging on as many matches as we could fit around full-time work. Come 2010, however, our first-born was three months old and did not care for international football - not one little bit.
I was on the afternoon shift at that point, but every time I sat down, he’d wail. Watching Germany dissect England is excruciating at best, but there’s nothing like doing it while you slow dance with a mardy bairn to really put the boot in. It was at this point that I stopped watching football.
That’s not to say I stopped taking an interest, however, as I’d just learned about matched betting - the clever-dick form of gambling where you don’t end up out of pocket as the bookies kindly pony up the stakes for you. Now’s not the time for the full ins and outs of the hustle as they’re way too complicated to explain in a glib aside (though if you are interested, see Nikki Hunter-Pike's post), suffice to say that it was a boom-time for bookmakers running promotions to expand their social media reach.
888Sport, in particular, was on a mission to own the market, and was giving away free bets and branded merchandise left, right and centre - in the space of a year, its various score prediction and caption competitions had provided me with a branded polo shirt, rugby ball, laptop sleeve, three hoodies, two packs of cards and a set of poker chips, not to mention countless free bets and a £60 sportswear voucher.
Then came the big one - the World Cup score-prediction comp. At this point, they really lost their marbles, because in addition to prizes for the overall competition winners, they also encouraged entrants to set up their own mini leagues, and gave these players prizes too. How they worked out a scoring system for the mini leagues I’ve no idea. Truthfully, I wasn’t paying attention. All I knew was that I hadn’t made the top three in the main league, so I didn’t give it another minute’s thought. So, you can imagine my surprise when, a few weeks later, a £120 voucher to spend on sportswear turned up out of the blue.
Sadly, it wasn’t long after this that the penny dropped at 888 HQ and I was barred for being - quite literally - a liability, as 888’s computers twigged that I was taking more money out of the company than I was putting in, so banned me from making any further wagers.
Disappointing as it was to call time on our relationship, lessons were learned and we both moved on: I stopped messing around and committed myself to comping properly, while 888 approached the next World Cup in a far more austere manner, with any suggestion of a re-run knocked squarely on the head.
Nonetheless, it is a truth universally acknowledged that where there’s a World Cup, there’s a prediction competition, and Brazil 2014 was no different. Filling the void left by 888 was a competition of even greater magnitude and generosity, which the Brazil Tourism Board had opened up to pretty much anyone, anywhere. This giveaway had over a hundred prizes, from vouchers to cameras to various Apple products. I didn’t make the top twenty, but still copped an iPod Nano, which was awesome - well, apart from the £30 of import duty I had to pay to receive it.
As this was my first year of comping during a World Cup tournament, I was only just starting to become aware of the sheer volume of competitions that spring up around it - not just the big-ticket giveaways from the official partners and sponsors, but also the numerous unofficial comps from companies that want to join in the excitement, but lack the deep pockets of companies like MasterCard or McDonald’s. For example, thanks to Carpetright, I walked away with an official England shirt; concurrent with this, I also won a tee-shirt of Archie Gemmill scoring against Holland in 1978 - which rounds out my heritage neatly.
The England shirt has served me well - not because I enjoy sartorial statements of nationalism, but rather because it’s super light-weight and doesn’t cling to my sweaty body when I play badminton. It’s also handy for entering football-related competitions, and to this end finally paid dividends this year when I won a giftcard and football from Screwfix for posting a picture of my best football cheer to Instagram. Considering that Screwfix was an official sponsor of the ITV coverage this year, surprisingly few people were entering its comps. Its daily Facebook giveaways were (as I discovered too late) getting fewer than 200 entrants, while this Instagram comp had barely a dozen. So, a lesson learned for next time is to check out all the TV partners too!
This year, I also won prizes from two completely unaffiliated companies - three £30 Decathlon vouchers and my choice of football shirt from the FIFA store. The football shirt came from a simple tag-and-follow comp on Instagram - again with barely a dozen entries. Unfortunately FIFA had sold out of my first, second and third choice of kit, so if you were wondering why there’s a picture of me on Instagram wearing the Japanese away strip, now you know.
The first Decathlon voucher, meanwhile, came from a prediction comp I’d found via Google before the tournament began. What I hadn’t clocked, however, was that the score prediction aspect was purely for fun, and that the question you had to bat away before entering said predictions was actually the tie-breaker for that round. You can therefore imagine my surprise when the promoter mailed to let me know that my throwaway comment - “5.30” - was one of the most creative responses to the question, “At what point of the working day are you most on top of your game?”
Any criticism you may wish to throw at the weakness of that response is well deserved - I dread to imagine the quality of the rest of the field that week. Still, if ever there was an example of “got to be in it to win it”, this was it. And, since we’re looking for takeaways, it was also a reminder of the importance of reading instructions!
In any case, you can be sure that I upped my game for the last few rounds. And yes, my renewed efforts did pay off, as I made it into the top three for the final two rounds, giving me a grand total of £90 to spend at Decathlon.
The other great thing about this year’s World Cup was England’s progress. Notwithstanding their overreliance on set-pieces and their charmed avoidance of top-notch opposition, the fact that the team advanced as far as it did was a boon for flash comps. To be sure, I drew a complete blank here, but again, some of these comps had ridiculously few entrants, so I’ll definitely be getting my Tweetdeck house in order for 2022.
At this point, it bears repeating that 2022 will be FIFA's first Winter World Cup, and in case I need to spell it out - that means it’s going to clash with the advents. With this in mind, I’m going to get my first prediction in early: it’ll be carnage!
How did your World Cup season go? Or did you focus on Wimbledon or some other event? Let me know in the comments section!
And so to June's wins! This roundup is notable for (a) the absence of the water bottle I won and (b) the awful face I make when my varifocals are sliding down my nose. I really must work on that...
There was also the matter of my Lucozade Made to Move win - but more on that another time.
In case you're wondering, the water bottle came from a local flash comp but didn't come in the post, so I totally failed to capture it on video. I'd apologise but I imagine you're over it already!
Obsession. Compulsion. There are times when the difference between the two isn’t so clear. The Great Oreo Cookie Quest is one of those times.
For the uninitiated, this app-based promotion is basically a scavenger hunt where you have no idea what you’re looking for. Actually, that’s unfair - there are daily clues, but in many respects it’s quicker simply to point your phone at anything and everything and hope for the best. (For a better description, see Di Coke's post.)
What’s up for grabs? Well, if you’ve time on tap, it’s easy enough to win yourself £15 of vouchers for the Google Play store. There’s also the star prize - a Galaxy J7 phone - for the first person to find all 390 items.
SPOILER! That prize has already been claimed, so if you’re planning to take part, you might as well put your feet up once you’ve bagged the vouchers.
That is, unless you’re particularly fond of obsessive compulsive behaviour, in which case, the pleasure of collecting items grows exponentially the further you progress. This is in no small part down to the fact that some of the items are nigh impossible to scan.
Take milk, for example. It must have taken me an hour to scan this one.
At this point in the game, I had fewer than ten items to collect, while the player in pole position had only one. So … everything to play for, right?
It had taken a few hours to get this far, and was plainly going to take hours more. By all rights, I should have conducted some sort of cost-benefit exercise with my time, but logic had plainly gone out the window by this point. By hook or by crook, that milk was getting scanned.
Thankfully, a kind-hearted fellow comper put me out of my misery with the following recommendation: froth it up a little and snap from above.
Ker-ching! Item scanned!
I did it! I scanned the milk!
I must have spent just as long fumbling with Google Image Search, trying to find a hatchet that would scan - no easy task when the app thinks they’re all axes. My doggedness paid off eventually, but when I realised I now had to scan an ice axe as well, my heart sank. I must have pointed my phone at a hundred ice axes, only to have the app think they were hammers, nails or, on at least one occasion, a stethoscope.
By now, I’d reached seventh place on the national leaderboard - woohoo! Unfortunately, the player who had been leading the pack had managed to find the last item on the list. Game over, in other words. Except for the fact that I hadn’t checked the T&C at this point, and spent another couple of hours banging my head against the wall, trying to scan pliers and coconuts before having the common sense to check the small print.
By the time I downed tools, there were three items I’d failed to scan, and a further three I’d failed to identify at all. Which was more frustrating I couldn’t say; however, the sense of relief as I was released from my obligations was overwhelming. My shoulders buoyed as their invisible burden was lifted.
Now all that remains is to spend the vouchers - has anyone got any recommendations?
Have you been playing the Great Oreo Cookie Hunt? And if so, how have you got on? Let me know if you need any clues!
Sometimes I win. Sometimes I learn. And sometimes I do the same thing over and over again in the hope that things will turn out differently next time.
Some would call that the very definition of insanity. And sometimes they’d be right. Sometimes, however, it’s less clear-cut.
Case in point: I used the same Faces for Florida entry for three weeks in a row. After failing to pass muster on the first week, the likelihood of a subsequent win was slim to nil, but since I didn’t have any better ideas, my only option was to hope the rest of the field had a bad day.
Fanciful thinking? Maybe so, but a long shot is better than no shot, as Steven Bradbury found in the 2002 Winter Olympics when everyone else in the 1000m speed skating final fell over, leaving him to collect the gold.
Unfortunately for me, in this instance, the other entrants blew me out of the water. But on the plus side, I don’t have to worry about taking a volatile eight-year-old on a long-haul flight.
Then there was the time, about three years ago, when I tried to win a Weetabuddy. For the uninitiated, this recurring competition requires entrants to scatter fruit on their breakfast in a sufficiently artful manner that it looks like a face. I chose the path less travelled, and skewered fruit to my biscuit so it could stand up.
As luck would have it, the promoter was looking for balanced breakfasts rather than edible voodoo dolls, and my entry failed to make the grade. Not that I really minded - at that point I was in thrall to the comping monkey on my back, and entering every effort comp I could find, whatever the prize.
But I kept the picture. It wasn’t like it was well composed, or for that matter remotely clever. But I did love how perfectly it encapsulated the absurdity of comping - after all, who in their right mind would pin blueberries to their cereal just to win a fluffy Weetabix? And more to the point, why would anyone even want a fluffy Weetabix?
I can’t answer that last question, but I do know that my mojo was wanting a boot up the jacksie towards the end of last year, and on a whim, I entered the competition again. With the same picture.
Common sense would suggest that having failed once, the picture would only flop again. But common sense can bite me. I won that fluffy Weetabix. And my son loves it. At long last, he can hug his favourite cereal - something I’ll never manage with granola.
So, what’s my point? Simple! Stubbornness pays.
Has your persistence, belligerence or plain old dogged refusal to quit, won you any prizes? Let me know in the comments below!
What with lots of promoters announcing the winners of their advent comps in January, this month started off really well. Things quietened off after that, with just a couple of small wins for #NationalTriviaDay that I won on Twitter. That’s an American hashtag day, however, so I’m unlikely to see most of those prizes as I directed them to my US-based sister to distribute among her brood (and I definitely don’t expect those macadamia nuts to last till I next visit!). Luckily, there was a turnup for the books last week, with one prize arriving within 24 hours of winning (result!) and another that I hope to feature in next month’s roundup.
Finally, I should add that this video is longer than it needs to be - sorry about that. It’s just that my second-born was especially taken with one of the prizes, so I indulged him with a little extra camera time. I do hope you’ll forgive me!
I'm delighted to report that December turned out to be much more exciting than the last few months and I had real fun putting this month's video together. Of course, the inevitable homage to Monty Python may have had something to with that...
