» Crappy Prizes

Chinese kids
At the moment I'm living in China working as an English teacher. As rewards for doing well in lessons it's common practice to give out little tokens to the kids. I've never seen anything like the way they get excited about the crap we give them. I try to give them some kind of decent reward like sweets and stuff but I've seen them go mental over crap like business cards, flyers, all kinds of shit. It's a private school so they're rich kids who have everything they ever want, but they wet their pants over a meaningless piece of paper.

A few years ago I was at an Ann Summers party. We were playing a game involving sucking pieces of dry pasta out of a bowl with straws (I cringe to remember), and I won. I was excitedly informed that I'd won a bottle of wine, which was given to me wrapped in classy-looking paper. I took it home looking forward to enjoying it maybe with the next evening's dinner. Sadly, on opening the wrapping, it turned out to be Lambrini.

My sister once won an all expenses paid holiday in Amsterdam. The only problem was, it was a holiday for one, so she spent the whole time there being quite lonely and looking forward to coming home.
(Tue 9th Aug 2005, 14:50, More)