Okay, now that just sounds like a plot: “So… they want us to spring for a Christmas party, eh? I know, we’ll make it so unbelievably awful that they’ll never, EVER ask again! That’ll save money!”
A few years back, a good friend was promoted from DJ to (I think) program director. She began sending me prizes for all kinds of contests the station was having, usually once or twice a month. Things like CDs, T-shirts, gift certificates, even concert tickets.
Then the station got audited. My friend thought she might be fired, for which I felt horrible. Then she told me that she worried about criminal charges for both of us, due to Payola laws.
It turned out that the audit was for a specific time period that did not include the period of time she was sending me prizes, but boy was I sweating for a few weeks.
Spouse and I attend his office xmas party (which is an imposition in itself). In the center of the table is the godawfulest centerpiece ever. Martha Stewart on steroids. It looks like…somebody made a still life with fruit and dried weeds. Then sprayed it gold. Then added some more fruit and more dried weeds. Then sprayed those silver. Then added a few more, for good measure. Tiers and tiers of this mounted to some kind of styrofoam backing. Ugly ugly ugly.
I say something like, “jesus god is that ever ugly.” Spouse warns me that somebody in his office picked it out, he doesn’t know who, but what if that person heard me? Okay. I’m cool. My lips are sealed.
So it turns out that this…thing…is the door prize. The big door prize (there are other smaller ones). The other smaller ones are things like gift certificates to a local spa, coupons for local restaurants, etc. But this one is The Big One.
The bad news: I win it.
The good news: Before I’ve dissed it publicly, at my spouse’s office party, a couple of people come up and tell me how lucky I am, and how they really really wanted to win it and tried to bribe the person who did the drawing. So, after a brief conference with spouse, I give it to the person who mentions she’d have loved to have it.
The almost bad news: She goes, “Oh no! I couldn’t!”
The better news: He talked her into it. It doesn’t go with our decor. (In truth, we don’t have decor. This thing goes just perfectly with no decor, IMO, but I keep my mouth mostly shut. I refrain from saying, unbelievingly, “You like that?”) Just in time. The damn thing was shedding. I would have dumped it as soon as I got it out the door. I frankly didn’t want the thing in my car. It would have been embarrassing to have it in my dumpster.
Now this was a party where you got some kind of number when you showed up. Not having learned my lesson, I later paid $1 for a raffle ticket for a similar horror, on the theory that I was only buying one ticket and it was for a good cause and I never win things like that. And I won that monstrosity, too.
So. If something is horrible, tasteless, and undesirable, I will win it, apparently. But if it’s at all desirable, or something I’d actually like to own, then I won’t. Now I know.
Oh–I also won a simile contest at a local writer’s conference. Pretty bad prize there, but it was basically a joke contest. I was proud to have won, because the competition was stiff, but the prize was so awful that I’ve repressed it.
Okay, I did not win this, but I COULD have, and it’s too good not to share.
A couple of months ago, a friend of mine came down to Bangkok from upcountry, a fellow American, happily married like I am. Goldfinger Bar in Patpong was having its 20-year anniversary party. For each drink bought, we got a ticket for the prize drawings at midnight. So we’ve got a bunch of tickets by midnight. Midnight arrives, and the prize drawings commence.
Randy, the owner, started with Third Prize, which turned out to be something like 10 or 15 shots at the bar. Well, my friend and I had been drinking a lot of beer, and we really did not want to start downing shots of hard liquor. So we were glad when someone else won that.
Then came Second Prize. Which turned out to be … a free woman, for all night. Your choice from among the bar’s usual stable. Wowee! BUT … as I said, we’re happily married. So we were glad when someone else won that. Whew! Dodged that bullet!
But my friend looks at me and says, “If a free woman was Second Prize, I wonder what First Prize will be???”
Well, we soon found out. First Prize was … TWO (2) free women to accompany you back to your abode all night. 
Well, no, we did not win First Prize. And glad we were. I don’t know about the Second Prize winner, but the funny thing about First Prize was that an old (older than my friend and I!) regular won, has a Thai wife and a kid. Randy kept needling him over the speaker system about what such-and-such his wife and such-and-such his little daughter were going to do when he took them home. I suspect he just took them out for breakfast somewhere.
So the next morning, I’m telling the wife about the prize drawings and said we were really glad we did not win and have to deal with that. And bless her heart, but she just said, “Well, if you win them, I guess you have to take them.”
I love my wife. 
ralph124c, you’re lucky. My sister only got in the third category!
I love the little things that make this letter great. How ‘CONGRATULATIONS.’ is a sentence all on it’s own. Or how they explain that they’re are giving away millions in their effort to ‘go global’ whatever the heck that means.
Tut-tut! You’re misquoting. They have a noble drive to go global. Far more eloquent, really.
Oh, and here’s Goldfinger Bar:
I won a meat slicing machine at a company picnic.
Since I’m a vegan, my friend offered to swap his prize, a croquet set. I swapped and then gave that away.
My mom got a Netflix subscription from my nephew. But just a free one-month coupon.
She felt obliged to “give it a fair test” and went 4 months of payments without ever getting a disk. She has no DVD player. She did that because she was “afraid to tell him I couldn’t use the gift”. Like he would ever ask or care.
I never win anything in raffles, but at a company party over the winter, I did worse - I won a pair of Martina McBride Christmas Celebration tickets. Nobody on eBay wanted them either.
Hey–prehistoric shark teeth sound pretty cool, actually. If you don’t want them, I’d be happy to take them off your hands.
Alberta! The place where they give away money!!
Some CalgaryDopers should go by that address and check it out. My guess is that it will be either a) nonexistent, or b) a private mailbox in a MoneyMart.
I tried putting the address into Google Maps and it found a place with a different address named “Galvanic Applied Sciences”. Sounds fishy to me.
Now that is funny. I had almost the exact same experience. My fiance and I went to her christmas party. The centerpieces were the metal industrial art looking candle holders. Sure enough, out of all of the cool door prizes that they gave away, I win that.
The kicker is that my fiance is the accountant for her company, and knows how much they spent on the centerpieces. It turns out that they were quite expensive, so we couldn’t just throw it out. So, it sat on our dining room table for awhile. It didn’t really match anything, but there it sat. Now that I think about it, it seems to have disappeared. I don’t even care where it went.
I once won a lightbulb. I was around eight years old at the time and it was the first thing I ever won. I was walking by a crowded wheel of fortune booth at the county fair and I stopped to watch the game. I wasn’t actually playing but after one of the spins the dealer announced that my spot had won and handed me my prize, which was the aforementioned lightbulb. In retrospect, the dealer was either trying to chase the little kid away from his booth or was entertaining the crowd. But while I had no use for my prize, I enjoyed winning it just the same.
To the best of my knowledge, it’s nonexistent. Avenues (and streets, for that matter) in Calgary tend to be numbered, and address numbers work by block. The address “460 Ellis Avenue” tells me that Ellis is an east-west road (all Calgary avenues are), no more than five blocks from where Centre Street and Centre Avenue would meet if they did meet (which would be somewhere in the river valley). Unfortunately, in that area, all the roads save one are numbered, and “Ellis Avenue” doesn’t sound like the exception (which, if you’re interested, is Barclay Parade) no matter how badly you pronounce it.
There are neighbourhoods with just plain names, so “Ellis Avenue” isn’t necessarily impossible, but they are either residential suburbs too far from the city centre to have a 400-block number, or well-established inner-city residential neighbourhoods like Mount Royal, which continue the block numbering from the city centre. In there, you’re in the 1700 to 2500 or so block range.
I was 6 or 7.
I was told I had won a book.
OOO! GOOD! I love to read.
It was a copy of the New Testament.
I complained. Loudly.
Of course, I was in Church, at the time.
Mom & Grandma had…words…with me, later.
Forgot to add, and got timed out…
But perhaps the most important giveaway is the lack of quadrant. All Calgary addresses carry a “quadrant” designator: NW, NE, SW, SE, depending on which quadrant of the city the address is in. For example, addresses are typically written as, “450 - 7th Avenue SW,” or “300 Country Hills Blvd NE.” (Country Hills Blvd is in one of those recent, far-from-the-city-centre suburbs I referred to in my previous post, but even that far out, the quadrant designator is still necessary.) Anyway, an address that doesn’t state a quadrant–and “460 Ellis Avenue, Calgary AB” certainly does not–is questionable by default.
I won an autographed copy of “Where the Red Fern Grows” (juvenile fiction about boy loving dogs who die and then a fern grows on their graves). I had read the book a month before I won it and was so upset about the doggie deaths that my mother nearly had to take me to counseling.
My local newspaper is quite possibly the worst rag in print. They can’t get anything right. The spelling and grammar are terrible. On top of that, they often have the wrong date, switch captions, repeat page numbers, etc. It was so bad, I stopped buying the paper.
After a time, the paper sent out survey cards to everybody in town. So I wrote how the paper sucked and why it sucked. All respondents were automatically entered in a drawing. Guess what? I won a free 13-week subscription. To make this more amusing, after a few weeks, the paper stopped coming. Then I got a semi-nasty note that my subscription had been suspended for non-payment. I called the paper and asked how could I be suspended for non-payment when it was free? The lady apologized, and she said she would fix the problem. I told her to forget it, since I didn’t want the paper in the first place.
I won one of those goddam chocolate fountains at last year’s Christmas office party. I had absolutely no use for something so stupid, so I gave it away a day later to someone at the office who admired it. Later I learned that the buyer of the raffle gifts had heard about it and was pissed. She thought I’d like such a “gourmet food item” because I’m such a foodie. Gah!