Masihivandana.com

During our first year in Canada we visited the National Exhibition at the CNE here in Toronto. This event is better known as the ‘EX’, short for exhibition. Its a fun fair and a good place to visit if you have small children because there are plenty of rides and eats. During our visit we came across a box which advertised a contest of some sort, I cannot exactly remember what was at stake but it could have been a motorcycle. Considering that we did not even have a car at that point I cannot figure out why but I put my name, address and phone number on a slip of paper and slipped it in the box. We forgot about it and many months went by. One day we got a call and the lady at the end of the phone told us ‘Congratulations, your name has been picked and you have won a vacation to …..’ I was very excited. I tool down all the details. It seemed we had to go downtown and attend a seminar of some sort. That Sunday I shared this good fortune with my pastor. At that point I was feeling ‘Man, isn’t God blessing us? We have just arrived in the country, I have a great job, we are settling in just fine and now out of the blue I win a contest!! God has his hands on our lives, that’s for sure’ and I think this may have been the tone in which the good news was communicated to the pastor as well. The pastor, also of Indian origin, but having been in the country for longer than me advised me to proceed with caution, mindful not to dampen my enthusiasm.

Fortunately, something clicked and I though ‘Wait a minute’ let me think this through. We got home and I called up the number and asked them a few questions. Pretty soon I realised that I wasn’t going to get anything for free so I told the lady ‘Hey, here’s a proposal, why don’t you give me the cash instead, I don’t really need the vacation’ - needless to say I never heard from them again.

Eleven years later there have been countless number of contests that I have won, without even entering my name in any of them. I can honestly look back to that slip of paper that I had put in the box and trace it back to that. You need to know - agencies collect names and addresses and then sell them to other sales organisations. Be very careful on how you disburse your personal contact information.