sweepstakes victory.

so if you have hung out with me at any point in the past six months, you might have heard me complaining (rather loudly) about the sweepstakes that was going on at my old job. our agency did a rather large sweepstakes for one of our clients and it involved a mail-in entry component. response to the contest was fantastic, which was great for the agency, but it was bad for me personally. rather than hire a sweepstakes fulfillment house, we decided to DIY that shit. BAD IDEA.

and they put ME in charge. well, partially in charge anyway.

it quickly got out of hand and we had to hire temps (shout out to nick, KC, and KC's aunt, whom i hired personally) and in the end we had about 10 people opening, sorting, stapling, and doing data entry for... get this... approximately 80,000 mail-in entries.

in the end it took a few months to finish. it took a lot of coordination, carrying bins of envelopes, and trips to the post office. (the post office HATED me, by the way)



the whole debacle was so annoying, i would even go so far as to say it played a tiny role in my decision to move on.

i never got to see the end of the project, as i left before the final week. i just got word today that they selected a winner: an 81-year-old woman from kansas won the $50,000 grand prize. and, to top it all off, she entered online - not via the mail.

by the end of this project, i was so seething with pure hatred for anyone who would ever enter an online sweepstakes via the mail, it brings me SO MUCH JOY to know that none of them won the grand prize. these professional mail-in sweepstakes folks were literally sending in entries every single day of the contest. all those stamps, all that licking envelopes, all those trips they made to the post office, was for nothing. all the assholes who decorated their envelopes with pictures and bright colors, in hopes that it would help their entry get picked, failed. fucking VICTORY!

sweepstakes jerks - 0
phil - 1
grandma from kansas who amazingly knows how to use a computer - 50,000