About three months ago I had entered a contest at a local boxed meat place (that kinda sounds dirty....) to win a free barbeque. The catch: you had to buy $50 worth of shit to get an entry card. I was well over the minimum purchase line for a card, so after ringing it all in, they hand me a little fill-in card with a picture of an awesome looking barbeque set in the corner of the piece of paper. Name, address....all the usual shit....and in the big clear selection bucket it went.

That was back in May. Since then, I'd forgotten completely about the contest and my entry form until this past Friday when the store called me. My ticket had been chosen from the bucket and I had won!! Hooray and happy day for me! They said they would deliver me the barbeque on Sunday (today) and to make sure I was home to sign for it and proof ID as the proper winner.

So I sit around the house all morning and afternoon waiting. And waiting and waiting and waiting until the doorbell sounds. My barbeque is finally here!! I rush to the door, open it and find a smiling douche of an employee from the store with a clipboard and a pen. He asks if I'm who I am, gets me to sign a few pieces of paper, and says congratulations on the win. I'm paying very little attention to him, as I'm more focused on the pannel van parked out front with another guy trying to haul something from the back. Finally, he removes a smallish box he then carries to my door and sets down.

"Is here okay?" He asks me. I said sure, and he disappeared back to the van. I noticed the guy climbed into the driver's seat and sat, not making any other trips to the back of the van. Finally, I asked the guy at the door where the rest of the pieces were. "Oh...." he says, "This is it."

What the fuck? Where was my barbeque? I asked him what he was talking about, and he thells me that the entire barbeque (the whole fucking thing!!) was in that tiny little box. I asked him how that was possible, and then he whips out a flyer thing from his jacket and shows me the "barbeque" I had won.

It was a Coleman camper barbeque. You know...those shitty little ones you take camping that only run off the mini-tanks of propane? Those shitty little ones that cook unevenly and tend to have any particle of food that touches its grill stick to it like gum to a chair's underside? Those shitty little ones that get about thirty minutes of cooking time per mini-tank? Fucking assholes!! They duped me!

I asked him where the real one was; if this was just some sort of add-on prize to the real one. The guy said no, this was it. He then explained how the company (an indipendent store run entirely by the owner) had an unexpected down-turn in profits and sales this quarter, and they had to sell the give-away barbeque for cost-cutting purposes. This was the best they could do with the money they had to work with. The original (awesome) 'que that was being advertised as "to-win" was donated by a local company for advertisement purposes, so, how the hell can he sell it? My best educated guess tells me the fucker took it home and claimed it for himself, then got this piece of shit from a Canadian Tire for a few bucks as the "here's your prize!" item. (The original to-win one was fucking amazing! Double-wide grill, storage drawers and under-shelves, side burner for pots and a separate warmer for buns or re-heating. The Golden Fleece of barbeques...minus all those queer Argonauts.)

I shook my head but wasn't entirely shocked. Nothing is for free, and nothing comes without a catch of some sort. I thanked the delivery guy and took my l'il camper grill into the house to store in the basement. This October I'm headed up North for a few days; maybe I'll use it then. (Probably not.....it's a shitty model of an even shittier brand.)

At least I didn't throw out my old barbeque to make room for the new one. That would have really chapped my ass.

Thanks for reading,

-The Big Bad