Friday, May 8, 2009

Even FREE CHOCOLATE has it's price....My Sanity!


Mr. T may have some nuts but Snickers parent company, the M&M MARS Company MADE ME NUTS this morning.
MARS had a great little marketing promotion, called the Real Chocolate Relief Act. They plan on giving away Candy Bars(or coupons redeemable for free candy bars actually)from a website they set up for this purpose, every Friday morning at 9 amET, until September.
Nice little idea but let me tell you, the first day, the execution SUCKED!
SUCKY SUCKED.
BIGTIME.
PISS YOU OFF SUCK
ED.
SERIOUSLY.
I'm sorry if this offends you or the Mars company or your pet 3-toed newt, but I hate wasting my time (53 minutes to be exact!) trying to fill out a website's form to get a single candy bar, only to have the website crash repeatedly on me.
How could the IT people working at Mars' websites NOT have planned for the site to be deluged with hits?
Maybe they need to NOT give away so much free merchandise, since they obviously really Need some extra revenue to pay for a bigger SERVER that can handle the online MONSTER they have created!!
Seriously, I feel like the biggest SMUCK for sitting at this machine waiting for pages to load, backing out of error message pages to try to get through to the last "we got your form & you get the chocolate in about 6 weeks from now" confirmation page.
No.
Such.
Luck.
After you finally got to the "congrats you got through, now fill this form out" page, you had 5 MINUTES to fill in the form and hit submit or you lost your place in line for chocolate and had to start over again. I got through TWICE but do you think I could get the form filled out and submitted in time?
That's a big honking NO.
I even changed computers and tried....got through on the other machine and STILL couldn't get the website to accept my submission.
If you had been in my yard this morning, peeping through the windows, you would have seen me flying through the house, shouting out near obscenities much like the Dad in A Christmas Story during one of his furnace rampages.
I am not a crazy person.....ok, maybe I am, but who isn't when driven there by things out of their control?....most things don't get to me like this did.
I wish Mr. T was here.....yah.....he'd give M&M/Mars what for!
He'd make sure those IT geeks at M&M/Mars had the kinks out before subjecting the chocolate addicted public to this Travesty of Candy!
"Pity the fool who comes between Sluggy and her Chocolate Bar!"
I hear ya Mr. T....
I calmed down about an hour later and sent M&M/Mars a nice email. Well, maybe nice isn't the correct descriptive word exactly....
I made it clear what I thought of their weakly executed idea.
And I further told them, come lunch time, I'd be heading out to my nearby store that sells Chocolate Candy to spend my money on a HERSHEY Bar!!!
As far as I'm concerned, M&M/Mars can stick that candy bar up Mr. T's A-Team, if ya get my drift....

Sluggy

6 comments:

  1. You go, Sluggy!! Give 'em hell and what for!
    Obviously they don't know who they are messing with. Enjoy your Hershey's this weekend.

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  2. Oh my! LOL. I felt your pain for about 15 minutes this morning, untill i finally gave up on the free chocolate bar!

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  3. LOL I couldn't even get to the page before I got errors so I gave up. Anyway there are Bliss bars free with coupon at Target. BTW Did you do all those Wags trips in one store? Did you just got back in line 14 times?

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  4. LMAO!!! You are too funny! That's exactly how I felt yesterday. I finally got through and managed to sign up some hour and a half later. Ugh....

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  5. Sluggy, I had forgotten about this until about 3 pm on friday, and thought "what the heck, I'll try." I filled out the form, only to get the response back "This email address has already applied for this coupon" or some crap like that. Like hell!! Trust me, I'd know if I filled out a form for free chocolate! After staring at the message for 2-3 minutes in disbelief, I shut the computer and walked away for the day. This morning, I check my mail first thing, and it says "we got you request, expect your coupon in the mail in 6 weeks." Ok, first of all, I've printed out coupons for worth more than $1 with alot less pain. What's wrong with making the coupon available right away? The only good thing I can think of about this, is this; one day I'm going to be having a bad day and I'll go out to check the mail and TA-DA! Free chocolate bar! What better pick me up than that? As for doing this every Friday, forget that, that's for the birds! Besides, I'm craving for some Reese's right now. : )

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  6. LisaPie...I did enjoy it, thanks! I forgot about the BAG of Reese's Whips I had sitting here that were FREE.lol I just grabbed one of those and indulged the choco addict trapped inside of me.

    Jamie....You must be smarter than me to let it go after 15 mins. I don't give up easy enough.lol

    Crystal....yah, I'm going to have to hike up to Target and get some of those bliss bars I keep hearing about. I just don't do Target on a reg. basis...but for chocolate?lolol
    And yes, I did do all those transactions. It works because I have a good store(generally), the store is busy so I just blend into the crowd(plus the cashiers there don't CARE if I go through 50 times LOL), and I don't bring kids with me. If I did that, I'd be too distracted and wouldn't be organized enough and it would take me all day to do 16 transactions instead of 45 min. to 1 hr. I also write out scenarios and alternatives if they are out of things I want to buy, so that makes it go faster.

    Diane....maybe I need to try your method next time. Pretend to go away and go back later after everyone is disgusted and gave up.lolol Congrats on getting thru!

    Mamaof4....looks like your method of enter worked too! I'll try this lowkey, take-it-or-leave-it-approach next time. And just think, you are allowed FOUR bars before it ends in Sept. Oh, I am SO looking forward to doing this again....and again.....and again.....and again.LOLOL I've got more Whipps here if you still need some Reese's.....about 50 left, so come on over! ;-)

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