Roto-Rooter has my email address because I used their online scheduling system to get a service appointment a couple of weeks ago. (I highly recommend it. Filled out the form online, and less than an hour later there was a dude at my house, uh, servicing my pipes.)

Today, I received an email inviting me to enter Roto-Rooter’s Pimped Out Powder Room Sweepstakes, which obviously I’m going to do, over and over again–because yes, that’s a towel rack/heater with a 17″ LCD TV that doubles as a mirror. And yes, that’s a toilet with a heated seat and a bidet. And yes, it’s a salon-style hair dryer. And a mini-fridge. And you don’t have to paint the whole room pink if you don’t want to, but maybe I do, okay? Maybe I want to look trashy, did you ever think of that?

Now I like to be an informed consumer, to create information symmetry wherever I can, so I read the sweepstakes rules. And I swear to god, under “Conditions,” I had to read this sentence a couple of times before I could even make sense of the words in this order:

If a Canadian resident is selected as a winner he/she must correctly answer a time-based mathematical skill test administered by phone/mail to be eligible for a prize.

So it’s already funny, because, you know, it says “Canadian,” and all things Canada are hilarious (Did you know there’s something called the Canadian dollar that apparently they use for money instead of real money? What a quaint little people they are!), but can anyone tell me why the devil Canadians have to have their math tested (and in a time-based manner, at that), to be eligible to win a shitter? Or, for that matter, why time-based mathematical skill testing of Canadians seems to be sort of a standard deal in sweepstakes? What happens if they get it wrong?

This will keep me awake tonight, I fear.

Filed under: Consumerism Rulez, Pop! Goes the Culture