Free Stuff

Everyone likes free stuff. Well this story actually happened several months ago, and I know that blogs are suposed to be 'now and happening', but I will tell you about it anyway!

Jan and I were bored one Sunday morning. We started wondering if there were any really good 'free' things to be had on the internet. A little bit of Googling revealed a whole world of free stuff online.

Our first stop was Charmin toilet tissue, it turned out that they had just started to sell extra large rolls of toilet paper, these rolls are too big to fit in the regular toilet paper holder. Charmin were offering a 'Toilet paper holder' extender for free, with free shipping and handling! Well who good resist an offer like that, we signed right up for this great offer.

Jan focused on useful stuff like shampoos and asprins, while I took the high road, and looked for the more esoteric products.

In total we put about 4 hours work into the 'free stuff' project, and then we waited. A couple of weeks passed with no neat stuff arriving in our mailbox, we were not surprised as most of the offers said that it could take 2 to 8 weeks to ship.

Then the onslaught happened. Free stuff in the mail! The charmin toilet paper extender was one of the first to arrive. We were so excited, we tore into the package. Our first truly free thing from the net! And there it was, a small piece of plastic tubing worth about 2 cents!

Over the next few weeks we had a pretty constant supply of free things. Just a few of the things received included:

• Tylenol and Motrim
• Some feminine hygiene products (aka Tampax)
• Refrigerator magnets
• Shampoo and conditioner
• Hand and body lotion
• Rosaries (we could have got a boat load of bibles, but we thought that people would start calling us!)

As I mentioned earlier I took the high road in my search. My treasures include:

• A cooking magazine from Kraft that arrives every couple of months, and it is quite good.
• Railway Age , a monthly magazine for people working in the railway industry, it makes for great bathroom reading, much better than Readers Digest.
• The Canada Post stamp collectors magazine, this is a quarterly rag about Canadian stamps (again good for the bathroom)
• A really nice visitors guide to Newfoundland, very glossy, lots of pictures.
• A lifetime supply of pamphlets about how to cook beans courtesy of the Ontario Bean Producers Organization!
• A Moosehead Beer lapel pin

If you find yourself at a loose end one weekend, you should give 'free stuff' a try!