Day 304 of 365 days.
So today, Steph and I drove up to Pymatuning Valley Resort to get a tour, hear a sales pitch and attempt to win $25,000. Well, two out of three ain’t bad. The resort is nice enough, I suppose, but really not great, and not the kind of place I’d spend my weeks itching to drive up to. It would have had to have been a WHOLE lot cheaper to make it worth it. The sales pitch wasn’t as hard as I expected it would be. I expect my "no really, I have no income" look combined with the fact that it was late in the day and the finances guy really just wanted to go home, made them try a little less hard they otherwise might have. So after that, we went into a little room where I picked a single key out of a barrel of 8,333 keys. Steph then chose one of three locks and attempted to open it with my key. Our chances? A paltry 24,999 to 1. A match for any greek. Sadly, neither Steph nor I are the slightest bit greek and the lock failed to open. We were thus given our consolation prizes a crappy 35mm camera (with coupons for 100 free rolls of film) and a trip for two (well, hotel for two, flight for one) to one of their resorts in Orlando or Vegas (presumedly so they can give us the sales pitch again). Since we came on a weekday instead of a weekend, we were also given four lovely prints of nature photography (you can kind of see two of them framed on the back wall in this shot).
Ah well, maybe we’ll do better when we try out for Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
Heeheehee! Yeah, well when I went to the one in Vegas, one of my prizes was movie tickets! Turns out they were to a chain that wasn’t even in VEGAS!!! After a big argument, they agreed to give me cash for them – I think it was to get me out of the building… maybe I was disturbing the other participants a bit. Shrug Good luck on the Millionaire thing… I’m rooting for you guys!
@lrayholly: yeah, actually we could have traded our trip for a crappy watch or bracelet or both our camera and our trip for a .075 megapixel digital camera (yes, you read that correctly, 320×240… not as good as the one in a cell phone). So we took the trip. Now the question is, will we take the trip?
.075, is that "Point Zero Seven Five"? I never knew there WAS such a thing!!!! Why that’s a waste of plastic isn’t it?
@lrayholly: yep… .075. And yep.
hehehe….100 rolls of free film? what is it outdated film? some terrible off brand?
sorry you didn’t win the $25,000… good luck with who wants to be a millionaire! Chris and I did a try out for the couples edition, they were paying for your wedding/honeymoon if you won….but we didn’t make it.
@pi c’s: thanx. That’s exactly what we’re trying out for.
Yeah, you are lucky you didn’t get the really hard sell. We got told we were the worst people on the face of the earth for not buying a timeshare the time we went through that. We did, at least, get $50 and a book of coupons for our trouble (the coupons were for Gatlinburg, which is where we were). However, the presentation took a lot longer than the advertised 90 minutes and it was our last day in Gatlinburg, so we didn’t get to use many of the coupons. 😛
The amusing sidenote of it all was that I worked for a real estate company at the time and was eligible to use the company discount on vacations to timeshares, which was basically pay $100 for a week in a timeshare, useable once per year, and I think the timeshares were with the same company as were being pitched (not that it matters, timeshares are pretty much the same wherever you go, from what I understand). I figured out how many years it would take to "break even" between using the $100 benefit yearly vs. buying the timeshare myself and it was, of course, several lifetimes. Uh, no.
@SydB42: It was funny, actually. Part of their pitch is going out of their way to point out 18 billion times that its not really a time share (and technically speaking, it isn’t). You’re a member of a resort club. Only, time shares don’t really bother me, so it wasn’t the best sales pitch on me.