Perhaps we should start this story with a little disclaimer, just like the one they put at the bottom of the screen during those middle-of-the-night weight loss pill commercials on TV: The following results are not typical.
Most people actually have great experiences when they win our contests.
Alas, not so for poor Betsy Peabody. Way back in March (yes, of 2014 – we’re not THAT bad), Peabody was the winner of our church scavenger hunt, and she was thrilled about it.
“Wow, I’m so excited! I hardly ever win anything, so this is a big deal,” Peabody said.
Little did she know what she was in for.
As the winner, she was entitled to a $20 gift card from a Concord business of her choice. Thinking spring, she selected Dips Frozen Yogurt.
Then nothing happened for a really long time, because we completely forgot to send her the prize she’d earned. She sent a few gentle and entirely pleasant reminder emails, and we answered saying we’d get right on it.
And we didn’t get right on it. But, as March turned to April turned to May, we figured it was probably time to take care of it.
Ideally, this would be where our story ended, but a few mailing snafus that were entirely our fault – one of which occurred while Keith was in Las Vegas for a week and couldn’t quickly rectify it – resulted in an executive decision: we were going to up the card value to $25 and send it out the very next day.
Which we did, and on May 16 – about two months after we named her a winner – we received this email message from Peabody: “The eagle has landed.”
But the Eagle forgot something, namely the $25 of value supposedly placed on the gift card. We knew we were in for it when we received another email from Peabody with the subject line “The saga continues . . . “
It seems Peabody, generous sole that she is, gifted her gift to her daughter and her friends, who had just started summer vacation. We’ll let her tell the rest.
“Picture this: I covet the Dips gift card and await just the right time to use it. It arrives – the first day of summer vacation. Three 13-year-old girls looking for an exciting adventure for their first day of freedom,” Peabody said.
“Thrilled to be given the coveted gift cart to independently wander downtown and enjoy a frozen yogurt treat while I, the ever generous parent, do some grocery shopping, they pick just the right yogurt covered with just the right toppings and proceed to pay with the coveted gift card – can you hear the musical background foreshadowing impending doom?”
Turns out the card was swiped thrice, to no avail. Somehow, it wasn’t reading properly. So the poor girls had to turn out their pockets to fund their own frozen yogurt treat, and Peabody was “later vertablly chastised for causing ‘the most embarassing moment.’ ”
Thankfully, we had kept our receipt (probably the first thing we’d done right through this entire ordeal) so we headed to Dips to see what we could do.
The fine people at Dips were more than happy to correct the error, printing Peabody a brand new card and leaving it behind the register for her next visit.
We informed her, and a day later she told us “we picked up the new card while doing some downtown errands on Friday and promptly got some frozen yogurt (but not too much, didn’t want to ruin dinner!). I think the saga ends here . . . unless, of course, something interesting happens when we use the rest of the card at our next Dips trip.”
We’ll keep an eye on our inbox, just in case. But it seems we’ve finally reached this tale’s happy ending, where our hero (Peabody) is finally rid of the bumbling villain (clearly us).
The cherry on top (do you put cherries on froyo?) is that Peabody is a faithful churchgoer and won the church scavenger hunt – it all seemed too perfect.
But she’s having a hard time convincing her daughter to follow the same life path.
“My daughter gives me a very hard time about my ‘obsession’ with church. I’m pretty involved in things there, so when I’m going off to one meeting or another, she points to this as her evidence,” Peabody said. “So when I won the church identification scavenger hunt, this deepened her evidence that I’m the most church-obsessed person in Concord and I probably only won because I’m likely the only one who participated (Editor’s note: That’s not true!). She has determined that the reason this saga continued is evidence that church is unhealthy for a person. So, we have had lots of laughs about this!”
That’s us, the Concord Insider, ruining church for teenagers one scavenger hunt at a time.
