Monday, March 29, 2010

Life is a Gameshow

Do you have your rewards card? How about your buy 10 get one free punch card? Or maybe you’re racking up those frequent flyer miles so you can redeem them for free rides. If you book your hotel rooms through hotels.com you’ll get a free night at some point in the future. I don’t remember ever agreeing to be a contestant on this game show of life. But then, my memory isn’t what it used to be. Maybe I took a quiz and didn’t know it. Maybe it’s my punishment for spending so much of my life off the grid. It’s true, I wasn’t paying much attention to popular culture. I do know one thing for sure, although it’s called the free enterprise system, there aint nothing free about it.
According to my spam folder I could be running a business on the side selling all the Viagra I can apparently get for free on the internet. I’d have a dozen free laptops, a couple of dozen free iPods and my bank account would be overflowing with all the money that anonymous millionaire wants to give away. I'd love to be informed if anyone I know, or anyone associated with someone I know has ever actually received one of those free laptops, or a check from Microsoft for ten thousand dollars.
It’s a blitzkrieg of lies lies and more lies. It’s almost a full time job to sort through all the shit, keep track of your place in line, tally up the points on your rewards card, cut out coupons from the Sunday paper and send in the rebate that came with your vacuum cleaner. It's completely insulting to me to be approached in this assanine manner and I do hope I'm not alone. Otherwise, things are way worse than I imagined and everyone is getting what they deserve.
If you see me walking around wearing my motorcycle helmet with no bike in sight, you’ll know I’ve had enough. And if you don’t have a helmet, aluminum foil will do just fine. I hear Safeway is having a special. If you have your Safeway card, you can buy two, get one free.