McBlunder

I have been on the road for 5 straight weeks; Kansas, Spain, Kansas, West Virginia, then Louisiana. No, that is not a common occurrence but I seem to have at least one “Travel Season” each year. Yes, it does wear on me and it is very difficult to spend that much time away from my wife and children. Often I try to find ways to reconnect with my family in those short weekends I have at home.

During the corresponding 5 week period, McDonalds has been running their Monopoly promotion that they do, it seems, at least once a year. If you are not familiar with the game, you get 2 monopoly property cards (or instant wins of fries/drink/etc) with the purchase of your drink, fries, certain sandwiches, and hash browns. The little cards also have a 10 digit number on them that you can take to www.playatmcd.com, type in, and see if you win a lesser prize in their online version.

While on the road I typically avoid McDonalds like the plague because of my affinity for vanilla shakes and their non-alignment with my current weight loss efforts. But, always one for a good game, I decided that I would eat primarily McD’s during the promotion. And as to my willpower, I have not ordered a single shake and have ordered my chicken sandwiches sans mayo 90% of the time as well.

At the end of the first trip I discovered a way to share my travels with my daughter. She would jump on my lap and read off the codes to me to type in. You can only do 10 codes a day so this has become a bit of a ritual for us on my weekends of late. Could I have done it faster and not mistake a Q for a 6 every single time? Yes, but the time with her quickly became my greatest motivation to keep playing. When you do the math 4 weeks of meals (one of the five weeks was in Spain, no McD’s to eat there), 5-7 meals per week, and 4-8 game pieces per visit, I quickly accumulated roughly 150 game pieces.

I have a smattering of free fries and breakfast sandwiches, about 15 Best Buy bucks accumulated, and now have every property except the “winning property” for every monopoly for both the paper and online versions of the game. Over the weekend I finally hit pay dirt, not once, but twice online. I won two free cell phone ringtone downloads! Both times, rather than print out the certificates I just told myself I would redeem them from the emails McDonalds said they would send me.

This morning at work I checked my Yahoo email folder and deleted the classmates.com, walmart.com, and the plea from the RNC to send in last minute election donations. Normally I ignore the Bulk email folder and let Yahoo delete those files after they have been in there for 2 weeks. (It averages between 700 and 2000 spam emails for any given two week period) For some unexplainable reason this morning I clicked the “Empty” button next to the Bulk folder! It was 30 minutes later when the implications of that decision hit me… Yahoo had filed my ringtones in the Bulk folder and… poof… I had killed them.

Was it the $5 million dollar grand prize? No. Was it even the $100 minimum online prize for the Baltic/Mediterranean combination? No. Does my cell phone even let me download ringtones? NO! What I deleted was the symbol of the time together with my daughter, a reminder of a high five from my princess after entering over 100 codes and finally winning, and it was a smile, kiss, and a hug when we won the very next night on the first code. All of that was bought and paid for with a patient wife and lonely nights in a hotel room growing ever more convinced that Bill Maher is the most conceited, disillusioned, and spiteful man on the planet. OK, technically it was my Corporate American Express Card but have you ever forced yourself to watch “Real Time”?

Ultimately my reward was that reconnection during the short precious days I had with my family over the weekends. Hopefully the last 20 codes will have a winner or two in them as well. But if you are reading of my blunder, I ask only one favor, don’t tell Michaela what her dumb old dad did…