<![CDATA[Recently I received a delightful little contest mailer telling me I can win stuff! Awesome right! But it's not really awesome in practice, and some parts of the text aren't even accurate. I just goes to prove that you shouldn't get your hopes up on contest mailers. The contest basically works like this: you scratch off the middle of the slip you get in the mail, and if your number matches any of the numbers around the scratch off area, you're guaranteed to win a prize. Obviously, since the entire purpose of this mailing is to draw in customers to a business, every single person who receives one of these things will be a winner in some way. When you get it, you aren't special. In the video above, I demonstrate this with a quick video blog of my experience dealing with one of these contests, and tell you the results and the conversations I had while participating. Part of this that I didn't discuss, however, was that now that I've gone ahead and participated in this little contest, they now know where I live, and my phone number. These are key pieces of information that will help them advertise and send more stuff to my home. An added side effect I didn't talk about. [charliead]]]>