On Friday, Joey and I received calls from a travel agency saying we had “won two round-trip airfares and $300 worth of gasoline”. Uhhh, we’re in Seminary and we’re always looking for cheap as free things.  We took the bait.

I lined us up to go listen to this schpiel at the travel agency last night at 8:00.  We were to bring our IDs, a major credit card (“for identification purposes only,” they assured us) and our listening ears.  We brought all that stuff and our game faces, too, because we thought we might need them.

I picked Joey up from class at 6:30 and we headed to Irving.  After getting lost (and I mean lost) we found ourselves accidentally where we were supposed to be in the first place and located the travel agency before getting dinner.  Unfortunately we had been ravenously hungry while being lost, so several cranky words were spoken.  (Such as “Where are you going” and “I think we’re lost” and “This is lame”.  I will admit that most of them were said by me.)

Once we found our destionation, we found dinner.  Dinner wasn’t nearly so hard to find, we ate at Urban Eatz and it was pretty good.  But you don’t care about our dinner, now, do you?  I didn’t think so.

(Heck, you probably don’t even care about the scammy travel agency, but for some reason you’re still reading.  Sorry, I’ll get on with this post so you can stop.)

We departed Urban Eatz and drove quickly back to the travel agency.

“You ready for this?” I asked Joey.

“Sure am.”

We pounded fists (it’s our demonstration of solidarity – we do it all the time) and got out of the car, Joey carrying his backpack full of books.  We walked in the door of Infiniti Vacations (which, can I tell you how annoying it is when companies spell their names wrong just to be all cutesie?) showed our driver’s licenses and my credit card and filled out our informational form.

I hope the lady who looked at my credit card didn’t have a photographic memory and memorize the number.

We were ushered into a freezing cold room filled with tables and asked to sit down.  Our agent was a large, spikey-haired dude wearing an ill-fitting gray suit and shirt.  He proceeded to inform us that our idea of vacations are actually not vacations at all, in his opinion.  This offended and irritated both Joey and I, causing us to adopt a stance that most psychologists will term as “defensive”.  (You know, you’ve probably seen it.  People look at you like you’re an idiot and cross their arms and lean back in their chairs?  Yep, that’s what we did.)  In fact, he told us so many times that things were not “vacations” that I almost snapped at him that yes, they were too vacations and that he would do well to hold his tongue.

I held mine, though.

After thirty minutes of being irritated by the large, spikey-haired dude, another man in an even more ill-fitting suit got up to begin the presentation.  He sweated so much that he actually wiped his forehead off on his suit-sleeve MANY TIMES.

Turns out, they wanted us to drop $10k on the ability to purchase cheap vacations.  Joey and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

Once the annoying salesman with the sweaty suit sleeves finished his presentation, Mr. That’s Not Really A Vacation returned.

“What did you think?” he asked, looking at us like we were from Mars.

“Well, it’s not in our price range,” I said, bluntly.  He had annoyed me long enough.

“OK…well, I’m in charge of customer service tonight, so I need to go help someone else.”  He got up and went to another table, leaving Joey and I to sit there by ourselves.

Joey and I looked at each other with amazement.  Seriously. This was a class act operation.

We snagged the piece of paper he had been filling out earlier and noticed that half our “responses” were not our responses at all, they were things he had suggested we say, and then filled them in.  Gotta love it.

We were beginning to grumble, it was getting on to 9:30 and I have Automatic Shutoff at 9:30. I can’t help it, I just need to remove myself from people I’m not related to after that time.  I become a grouchy.  Fortunatly someone else came to sit at our table and began filling out a survey of our impressions of Mr. That’s Not Really A Vacation.

She filled “excellent” in for each category, even though our answers were far from “excellent”.

Then she left and someone else ushered us into another room to give us our free gift vouchers.  I was getting glowery by this point, and generally unpleasant to be around.  Joey tried to distract me as one would distract a 5 year old who is getting too sleepy.

“Do you think he bagged these himself?” Joey asked me, indicating the deer and pheasant heads displayed on the office wall.

“Gross.” Was my only response.  (Can’t fault him for trying, though.)

Within five minutes we had been handed our vouchers and were out the door.  On the drive back home, I began to read the loopholes.

“Hmm…to use these airline tickets we have to pay a $65.00 processing fee…and we have to give them three dates and locations…”  Nice.  Nice.  Spend $130 to get something for free.  (Although that still is $150 cheaper than driving to Iowa…and would save us 24 hours in the car!)

And for the gas card?  We haven’t figured out its loopholes yet, but you have to spend $100 per month in gas to get it for free…and our little Corrola doesn’t need $100 worth of gas per month.  But I’ve got Joey working on the fine print, so maybe we can figure that out before too long.

So…the verdict?  We probably wasted our evening.

Hiss.  Boo.