Hope Deferred and Burritos Lost

Apparently Daniel & I have been on a contest kick this summer. We have currently entered 3 contests this summer. Daniel is the only winner in our house.

Contest #1."Anderson's Got Talent" show. Let's not talk about that except to say that I lost.

Contest #2. Graeter's coloring contest. We colored pictures and brought them to Graeter's on July 31st, the last day for free ice cream. The next day Daniel got an email saying he had won first place! He won a $15 gift card- not too shabby since we got free ice cream anyway just for turning in our pictures!

Contest #3. Adventurrito with Chipotle. If you have been in a Chipotle restaurant lately you will likely have seen the Adventurrito poster with the treasure chest of burritos, advertising the chance to win free burritos for 20 years. 20. YEARS. of Chipotle burrito goodness. Be still my salivating tongue. So, I think to myself "YES! This is worth my time!" I log in, create an account, and start the games, which consisted of 19 days of Chipotle puzzles. Some were easy Chipotle trivia, others took a little digging. I learned a lot about Chipotle, they earned a lot of my respect, and now I have a serious Chipotle craving. (Well done you sly dogs...) For the first 19 questions you could get them wrong and try again. Not so for day 20. You had one shot at glory, miss the question and you did not get entered in the grand prize drawing. Thursday, Day 20 was the final day. I click on the question... only to find that question 20 consists of 20 MORE questions. Oh boy. It's 10pm at night and I have just unlocked the puzzle. So we dive in. Daniel & I split up the questions and get busy googling. We did AWESOME! We are tag team rockstars, and for the most part we found the answers without having to use the cheat blog posts that others had written. It was fun doing it together too. I can't speak for Daniel but I had a good time agonizing over their silly/impossible/frustrating questions. At 1:30am, after having checked and double checked our answers, I hit submit. But there was no feedback as to how many questions we got right! So after all that work we weren't even sure if we would be entered in the drawing. So... we wait. Will we win free burritos for 20 years? Will Isaiah grow up having to never pay for Chipotle? Oh the possibilities! Friday, I hop on the Adventurrito website just to check and they had the answers posted! Ohh la la! I scroll down, we got every one right! One step closer to burrito glory. But wait... one of the questions went awry! Turns out Chipotle made a test writing mistake so they're accepting 2 answers. Except we didn't choose EITHER of their answers! We were confused by the 2 conflicting answers so we made our best guess. Which turned out to be WRONG.

Chipotle's mistake

So that's it. We're out of the running for 20 years of free burritos. We're out on a technicality! Not even entered in the drawing all because of poor question writing, or poor answer writing, or poor researching... or something! But then I think, "Well, maybe they'll toss this question out altogether. Any teacher worth their Master's degree knows that when writing a test, if a test question is compromised you can not hold it against the student or their final grade." Apparently the Adventurrito test writers are NOT teachers who hold Master's degrees. BUT THEN! Saturday night, this email appears in my inbox...

The title of this email should read: PSYCH, SUCKER! YOU LOSE!

Chipotle made me FEEL like I had won, but no. This is a loser's email. A "thanks for playing but ya missed a question" email. Sigh. Another contest lost. I'm so mad at Chipotle but I'm also torn. I want to boycott. To stay mad at them for ruining my chance at 20 years of burritos. But... I sure could go for a consolation burrito right about now. (Once again, well done you sly dogs...)