Pinkerton's Weblog

How The Test Was Won And Where It Got Us

If you’ve ever won anything in Canada—a new car; a free cup of coffee; even a pair of my crusty socks (assuming you participated in Jay’s Ultimate Giveaway Crusty Sock Sweepstake Spectacular)—then you're familiar with something called the Skill-Testing Question.

Since it’s only applied in Canada, I’ll take a second to explain what the hell it is. Listen up, Americans, I'm only going to say this once. You too, Australia. Don't think I don't see you passing notes in the back.

Here t'is: for every McDonald’s Scratch-N’Get-Fat! Giveaway or Tim Horton’s coffee promotion in Canada, your winning ticket will have a skill-testing question on the back, which you legally need to solve before McDonalds gives you burger one. Calling it a “skill-testing” question is a bit of a misnomer, actually. Most are just basic math questions ([10 x 2] – 5=_________, for instance). You’re only going to have trouble with a question like this if you spent every day in Grade 5 math class picking brains out of your skull through your nostril.

Even if it turns out you’re hopelessly stupid, however, McDonalds won’t discriminate against you. I scratched at a ticket that came with my receipt while waiting for my Big Mac a while back, and when I won free fries the cashier handed me a pen and said “Can you write 26 on the back please, sir?” I’ll admit this could be considered a bit of a skill-testing question in itself—Can I? Doubt sets in—but on the whole, McDonald’s isn’t as immensely concerned about challenging you with arithmetic as they'd lead you to believe. In fact, McDonalds doesn’t really give a shit if you drove there in a moped covered with unicorn stickers and paid them in boxes of UNICEF pennies. If you have a pulse, McDonalds will give you an irregular one.

It’s somewhat touching, I suppose, that McDonalds is so idiot-friendly. (Though to be fair, if McDonalds discriminated against the stupid they’d have no one left to design their ad campaigns. I’m Lovin’ That latest one!)

Anyway, if the skill-testing questions aren’t actually honing our skills to deadly Mensa points, what is their purpose? why do Canadians have to fill the damn things out in the first place? Here's why.

As it turns out, it’s illegal to have a lottery without a license in Canada—presumably because just about the only people who make money from lotteries are, well, lotteries. Not licensing them is like giving people permission to print stacks of money in their backyards. Conversely, licensing and strictly regulating lotteries stops Joe and Jane LottoScam from getting rich off the sorts of people who buy lottery tickets—a unique breed of idiot either unwilling or unable to comprehend what “odds” are, and who will give you handfuls of money until they die if you tell them you have a special-plus extra-lucky prize for them under your desk.

Obviously the Government feels the need to step in and stop this, or the money would go to someone who isn't them. This pisses Governments off. To prevent this, the Government makes getting a lottery license a complicated hassle, under government mandate that everything they do in some way makes taxpayers' lives a complicated hassle.

Enter McDonalds, who strolls into Canada with bags full of barely edible food and a sackful of dreams to make a Scratch-N-Win burger promotion. But because they're technically giving away burgers through chance alone, it’s considered a form of lottery, which means the Canadian government can demand ungodly amounts of cash from McDonalds, which they can then invest in more laws forcing Canadians to mail them all their money.

McDonalds, no stranger to gouging and immoral business practices itself, tells the Canadian government to go fuck a beaver, and sics its enormous mountain of attorneys on the Canadian Criminal Code. Hence the skill-testing question, which adds the illusion of skill into McDonald's burger lottos so they're no longer games of chance.

Fucking ridiculous, am I right? But before you roll your eyes at Canada, damn Yankees, keep in mind that this sort of eye-crossing hypocrisy exists everywhere. For instance, gambling is illegal in Iowa because gambling is a vice, and thus bad. So Iowa passed a law legalizing the riverboat in 1989, under the rationale that the place where the gambling happens is on the water, making it imaginary in the eyes of God.

At first riverboat laws were harshly Draconian, only allowing a set limit on bids and certain amounts of time you could gamble for. Iowa, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, Indiana, and Missouri quickly followed suit.

Riverboats, let's make this clear, sucked. Iowan government never let you forget that you were committing religious hate crime by gambling, and were thus an irretreivable bastard. They simply kicked you out to sea and took all your money while they did it. Lacking any alternatives, gamblers flocked to Iowa's smug little riverboats in droves, willing to put up with the vise-like controls on gambling and drinking for the chance to give strangers free money. (Once you'd gambled a set amount for a set time, for instance, you were forced to just hang around the boat until it ran its circuit and docked four hours later. Your only recourse here would be, logically, to get drunk off your ass—a decision made more challenging, sadly, by the one drink you were allowed to get drunk off your ass with).

But then something happened. Other states began legalizing gambling altogether, the athiest commie bastards; then the Native Americans threw in their hats, the Godless swine; and before long Iowa’s riverboat scam started to look like the complicated hassle it so assuredly was.

Today riverboats still have to be in the water, but most are moored permanently to docks or float in a thin puddle nowhere near a river. Faced with a choice between piousness and tourism, Iowan legislators decided to gamble on vice, abandoning all the time limits, betting limits and stupidity in favor of not losing all their tourist dollars to Native casinos.

The only holdout from the early days of riverboat gambling is that riverboats still technically have to sail around actual rivers. Riverboat owners naturally told the Iowan government to go fuck a beaver when they heard this, then sic'd their enormous mountain of attorneys on the legislation. Riverboats currently “cruise” the rivers between the hours of 4 and 6am, for about three or four months a year, thus giving them the illusion of being seafaring vessels.

Fucking ridiculous, am I right? I haven’t even gotten started on Prohibition, but even these two examples sort of illustrate the moral here: it doesn’t matter whether you make a law for the good of the community or because God told you blackjack makes Jesus cry: McDonalds, in league with the gambling lobby, will still crush you like a fucking bug regardless, in front of witnesses, and no one will bat a goddamn eye. Don’t cross those guys, man.

Descartes blanche

I work in an office building situated on the floors directly over a mall. To get to work in the morning I have to cut through the main concourse floor, take an escalator up to the second floor, and from there get into an elevator that scales up the wall to the office floors above. The elevator’s made of glass, so you also get a decent view of the mall on your way up, if bird’s-eye views of shopping maniacs on the concourse floor, shopping like they never shopped before, is your sort of thing.

The downside to this process is that my elevator is constantly being invaded by confused-looking and arguably mentally stunted shoppers who’ve inadvertently become separated from the shopherd and have no idea how to rejoin them. Now, the escalator that takes you up a floor only has a few shops – a pub restaurant, a optician’s, a public bathroom and some lockers – so outside of a slim cross-section of shoppers interested in getting lenses, buying deep-fried jalapeño poppers or getting rid of deep-fried jalapeño poppers, there’s not any real reason for a shopper to take the escalator up at all. I theorize, in fact, that the people who wander up a level are actually just, in their own sad way, "questing". Not content to sample the meager banquet of shops on the concourse floor, they get adventurous and begin looking for the elusive shops of mystery unknown to the common shopper. Here There Be Bargyns.

Nevermind the intractable problem of how a store that well hidden could make a profit; I’m more interested in the way it deftly supports my theory that every North American secretly believes themselves to be a super-special genius among a sea of like-minded sheep, then uses this knowledge to do the same stupid shit everyone else does.

For example: ultimately, given the astronomically ridiculous odds, would we buy lottery tickets unless a part of us sorta kinda just knew we were special? “Oh, sure the odds of winning are 916 million to one… for regular people. But I’m Fred Williamson from Portland, Oregon! I’d better buy five tickets.”

This is also the impetus, I suspect, behind little things like running red lights (I know it’s dangerous and creates traffic jams for other people, but I’m in a hurry!”), littering (“If everyone did this our country would be a shithole; so it makes sense that only I be allowed to”) or any other instance where a third party sets up an allotted time limit or portion or rule for the good of every citizen, that we see as a good idea for everyone except, of course, us (“It’s okay if I cut in line, because I’m a way bigger fan of this movie than everyone else here”).

It seems pretty conclusive that, even if we don’t consciously admit it, our close daily proximity to ourselves seems to foster the deluded notion that we alone are possessed of a life burdened with consequence and greater meaning, giving us some kind of Descartes blanche: I think, therefore I am allowed to act like a dick. With such a deluded justification to ignore the concept of empathy, it’s little wonder we often draw ourselves up a different sort of rule book than we’d expect others to abide by. We honk at the idiot who cuts us off on the freeway, then cut someone else off because that first idiot made us late.

It’s not just the little things. It's the huge things, like attaching religious significance to sudden strokes of good fortune (“Thank you, Jesus, for curing baby Justin’s bronchitis”) while stridently ignoring any specific religious significance of the bad (“Baby Justin’s no longer with us now – but we cannot know God’s purpose”, for example, and not "Wow, God really must fucking hate us"). In both cases, though, we’re still concluding that divine intervention governs our lives; that Jesus giving you a raise, winning you an Oscar or curing you of illness with one hand, then devastating a Nigerian village with AIDS, sparking race riots in Los Angeles and allowing ethnic genocide in Rwanda with the other is all part of a "divine plan". Personally, I'm of the mind that if Christ’s divine plan has “Do Nothing To Prevent The Massacre of 500,000 Tutsi Refugees” as Step Three and “Give Edna Fitzgibbons of Orange County, Florida a Winning Lottery Ticket for $5,000” as Step Four, this poor clod's entire operation is in need of some outside consultation.

In fact, the only time the Descartes blanche rule doesn’t seem to apply is when being special means having to do something you don’t want to do. In this scenario, almost everyone suddenly turns into a big-picture atheistic statistician. Hence low voter turn-out: (“What difference could I make? I’m only one man!”) Look: if Jesus sees you as special enough that he’s guiding your hand to the right fucking bingo hall, he’s probably willing to at least listen to your voting choice for Governor.

All of this, in a roundabout way, typifies the shoppers who take the escalator up to no man’s land, then invade the elevator in the hope of scrounging out secret shops. Common sense would dictate that if the mall architect’s making an area this cumbersome to find, it’s doubtful you’re going to find a hidden bounty of Orange Julius and GAP. Yet daily I ride up with these hope-filled idiots -- many of whom, even when confronted with the inarguable fact that they’ve just taken a wrong turn into an office building, still walk around on the hunt around for bargains, convinced they'll find more mall if they walk down the hallway. I’m inclined to try and sell one of them my stapler.

On the ride up today was an old couple who’d accidentally gotten in the elevator, I think, under the impression that it went down. It does not. It rests on an enormous concrete bunker, lacks any buttons reading down, and in fact goes up a wall, displaying all of its mechanisms in plain sight and revealing no ordinance that could somehow smash it through ten solid feet of concrete down to the concourse floor. Yet this too fools about 20 shoppers a day, all of whom rode up the escalator, walked five feet forward, then evidently decided to take an elevator back down to where they were thirty seconds ago instead of just turning around and taking the escalator.

The old couple were bickering about where the hell they were, and it occurred to me that they’d most likely been riding the elevator for some minutes, feverishly jabbing buttons in the desperate belief that one would eventually return them to the sanity of the lower mall.

“Are you trying to get down?” I asked pleasantly enough (not "get down", of course. I'm not that swinging).

“Yes!” gruffed the old man. “We’re trying to get to the parking lot.”

“This elevator doesn’t go down. Did you come up on the escalator?”

“Yes,” replied the more visibly pleasant and less frustrated old woman.

“You need to take the escalator back down to go down.”

“We just want to get there!” said the irritated old man, stabbing at the glass window to a door across the way marked Parking Lot. I should mention that on the floor with the pub, the optician and the bathroom, there is also a catwalk that leads across the divide of the first floor mall, bridging the gap and giving access to the parking lot on the other side. It’s clearly labeled, to the degree that even the short-sighted old man had divined that was his destination; but the act of getting from point A to point B eluded them.

I was briefly at a loss for words. The old man was stabbing at a window that gave a complete bird’s-eye view – a map, basically – of both where he was and where he needed to be. An 8-year-old child would have been able to figure out that if they wanted to get to the parking lot, they simply had to cross the catwalk. Why this couple’d elected to take the elevator instead mystified me. Maybe they wanted to attack the parking lot catwalk from above.

“We need to be there!” he said again, pointing at the parking lot door.

“I… uh… why don’t you take the catwalk?” I said.

“We tried that!” he replied hotly, though of course he hadn’t, since if he had he would have succeeded. It’s not like the catwalk was a labyrinth of tough choices. Once on it, you basically only have three options: move forward to the giant sign labeled Parking Lot; move backwards, away from the sign; or just stand still and enjoy the view. A fourth and less reasonable option, of course, would be to get off the catwalk altogether, hop on a nearby elevator, then ride endlessly up and down pointing angrily at the catwalk to confused strangers. This option had been the one the seniors had selected as most sensible.

I got off at my floor and bid them good-day. I suppose I could have practiced a little more empathy and helped them find the stupid catwalk directly in front of them; but evidence suggested it would be much more empathetic to a greater number of people if I did nothing to aid these two in getting behind the wheel of a car. Besides – I know most people should help others, but I was in a hurry, so it didn’t count.