Friday, August 26, 2005

Disap-POINT-ed.

I may not get health insurance or paid vacations or any benefits like that working as a contractor at Orbitz.com, but at least I get free soda. Everyone does. Regardless if you’re an official employee or just a lowly contract worker such as myself, all you have to do is walk up to the kitchen’s vending machine, punch in your selection, and your soft drink of choice plops down – all without any exchange of currency.

In recent weeks, the Pepsi people have been holding a little under-the-cap promotion where one out of every six caps can win you a free bottle of soda with the additional purchase of any other bottle. Unfortunately, with it being free in the first place, it’s a pretty crappy prize. All other non-winning caps have a value of one point that can be accumulated and entered online to win other items.

I went to the site to see what those prizes might be, and found that I could get myself a nice hat for the small sum of 40 points. With soda being free and all, I thought it a doable amount, but didn’t want to risk contracting diabetes from that much sugar-filled soda intake. So I placed a cup in the kitchen with a note asking for bottle cap donations. I figured that most people didn’t give a damn about their points and would gladly toss their caps in the cup after finishing their bottle.

I figured right. By the end of two weeks, there were three cups filled with bottle caps sitting on the shelf in the kitchen. It was well over the necessary amount of points needed to get a hat. There was probably even enough for a t-shirt.

And I probably would have gotten that t-shirt too if I hadn’t walked into the kitchen the other day to find the entire cap collection gone.

Who the hell steals bottle caps? There are computers lying all over the place in the office. Steal those! Leave my damn caps alone.

Now I have to actually buy my apparel.

In the coming weeks, if I see anyone walking around the office with a Mountain Dew t-shirt, I’m kicking that bastard’s ass.