Tuesday, April 08, 2008

what do you get if you multiply six by nine

I was just reading the rules for a win-a-free-ticket contest from SAS and came across this rule:

"Due to Canadian law, if a potential winner is a resident of Canada, he or she will be required to correctly answer, without assistance of any kind, a mathematical skill-testing question administered by telephone or e-mail to receive his or her prize."

Huh? What do you think that's about?

7 comments:

Racine said...

Prolly to prevent bots from entering the contest a million times!

towwas said...

No, it's after you win! If the randomly selected winner is a Canadian, they'll call you or e-mail you and make you answer a simple math question.

erin*carly said...

i would totally fail. sadness.

towwas said...

Ok, I googled it, and this is more or less what I suspected:
http://contests.about.com/od/sweepstakes101/f/caskillquestion.htm

Anonymous said...

They do that at OLS every year. They used to ask the winners while they were still standing on stage in front of everybody. Of course, they'd make the questions really easy. But I can imagine that just making it worse--picture yourself faced with a basic arithmetic question in front of a few hundred of your geeky peers....

The last couple years I think they've waited to ask them till later.

towwas said...

Oh my gosh. That would be terrifying.

Unknown said...

The comparison to policies in the US (from your link) is really interesting - I've always wondered how companies pick the poor employee who has to reply to all the requests for entries without purchase. Like, is there just one guy at coca-cola that has to mail out bottlecaps to people who want to enter without buying a Diet Coke? I wonder if he sends all losers out of spite, or all winners to reward folks for taking the trouble?