Free Stuff (apparently not here)

Recently I have been so bored that I’ve been checking out the offers in various competition sites, auction sites, “auction sites” and even in some “get-some-poor-sucker-to-try-these-and-we-will-give-you-a-prize” sites.

I have been looking for a Macintosh computers. I’m THAT bored. The first site type, competition, was fruitless. So far I haven’t win anything but instead I’ve only shared my personal information with various sites that will most likely use the info for direct marketing. Oh, I just hate telemarketers… (I tried to win The Sims 3, some HP netbook, some MacBook and a big LCD TV)

The auction site I’ve been visiting is actually quite nice. It’s just that the merchandise is used and there’s no guarantee that I would get the product after paying for it (or get something completely different). For quality products the prices go high so fast that I cannot afford them any more. Then there are the old Macintoshes whose prices are still way too high. There’s no way I would pay 200 € for 233 MHz iMac nor would I want one in the first place… It’s also funny to read entries posted by computer-illiterate people. One such entry was for selling a computer with 500 GHz hard disk and 6,3 GHz RAM.

Then the “auction sites”… These were kind of auctions that you pay so you can bid, but the price grows only by one cent per bid and there’s a time limit. If nobody bids higher than you in, let’s say, one minute, you win the item and pay the current price, which is remarkably lower than the actual value of the item. Currently there’s bidding going for “Apple iMac 20 2,66GHz” and the highest offer so far is 42,43 €. The Mac’s value is said to be 1 099 € on the site. The price of 42,43 € consists of 4 243 bids that you can buy in bundles (500 bids for 384,90 €). That bundle makes 77 sents per bid which in turn makes 3 266 € that the bidders have paid for the Mac. These kind of auctions are not even considered auctions in Finland and there’s investigation going on if these sites are legal at all.

Finally the “get-some-poor-sucker-to-try-these-and-we-will-give-you-a-prize” sites. I signed up to one site in hopes of a free iMac. The tricky part is that I would have to get 50 people to sign up and “complete an offer” to get “iMac – 24 inch Core 2 Duo”. I don’t know that many people and I really don’t know how to get anyone to complete any offers, but I was hoping that perhaps you could do it. I read somewhere about a guy who set up a fake MySpace-profile as a cute girl to get referrals, but I don’t want to trick people into anything. Maybe some of the readers of this blog entry would like to click the link that might make me happy someday (Goes to the FreebieJeebie site with me as your referrer).