This Means War

So, I'm becoming a turn-key script kiddie for our group. I guess that's good. It's work, so that's good.

I checked some of the files that Barnes and Noble sent us as part of their data feed...and it came up with 47,000 orders that had errors in them, out of 250,000. That's a 20% failure rate. Thumbs up Barnes and Noble!

I just checked basic things like making sure the products actually added up to the correct amount, and each field had the appropriate number of data entries if an order had more than one product. Yay.

However, it's hard to talk about such trivial things such as scripts when a battle is brewing in the office. Oh yes, a full fledged battle.

It's become a routine of mine to occasionally restock the fridge with pop when it starts to get empty. We have two closets devoted to holding all sorts of pop, mostly in fridge packs of 12 or in bulk cardboard trays of 24 or so.

I've recently noticed that on most Coca-Cola fridge packs there's a little logo that says “mycokerewards.com.” About a week ago, it dawned on me that I could simply reward myself by doing the office a favor and restocking the fridge.

The fridge packs have a little paper perforation around the corner of the box which you rip off, opening a little slot for the cans to be taken out. It is on this perforated corner that the Coke reward codes printed.

Each fridge pack is worth 10 points, while any normal bottle is only worth 3 points. Most of the rewards online are pretty ridiculous and far fetched to even try for – 625 points gets you a $25 gift certificate. Many thousand points can get you a cruise or other neat prizes.

They do, however, have sweepstakes that are 3 points per entry, with a maximum of 20 entries allowable each day. They have a super nice, Canon SLR camera that you can enter in. As you guess, the more you enter, the better your chances are to win.

So, for a few days I would casually enter in 1-4 of these codes in if I restocked the fridge. No one really stocks the fridge anyways. Except one man.

This...larger man gets serious in restocking the fridge. The day where our drink supply is getting low in both the fridge and the closets is a sign of when the new, huge shipment of pop comes in. On this day (or any morning where the fridge gets empty) , he completely stocks the fridge. He goes to town for about 30-45 minutes organizing this thing. Things are stacked in order, perfectly on top of each other and everything is displayed in a sparkling manner. I wouldn't be surprised if they were alphabetical.

Earlier this week, when I noticed he stocked the fridge, I did some inconspicuous searching of the garbage to see if he threw out the coke rewards so I could you know...enter them in online.

Then, the discovery came. I found box filled with cardboard scraps, mostly the perforated corners of the fridge packs. But...they were only the excess scrap of the cardboard corners – the part where the codes where printed on were nowhere to be found! They were neatly ripped out of the cardboard.

AHHH! A conflict! I must get coke rewards!

But, how am I to achieve this lucrative bliss of obtaining these codes if another person is systematically and efficiently stocking the fridge? What am I to do?

I do something I call “preventive maintenance.” – stopping the infection at its source.

Probably the most annoying thing when stocking the fridge is ripping off the corner of the fridge packs, because if you don't do it right it comes off in a mess, or you can rip open the whole pack. I mean, come on...who wants to be responsible for ruining a fridge pack? Seriously...

So, why don't I just do it for people?

A few fateful days ago, I opened up the closet and went to town. I organized and prepared all the Coca-Cola Zero's for immediate refrigeration. That means, I stacked all the packs of that kind in a block, made them all facing one way, and had all the perforated corners removed. That means, to restock the fridge, it's a simple process to find the kind of pop you need to restock, then plop it in the fridge – no ripping or frustration necessary. Nice and easy.

The best part of it all is that while providing a service to the entire office, I get the Coke codes :-).

I'm ridiculous.