Sometimes it takes me a while to learn my lessons.

The grocery store was running a promotional game based on that “Get Out of Jail Free” game – you know the one. At the start of the “game” you get a “board” and “game pieces”. The amount of game pieces given out depends on your purchases every week (or three times a week in my case). Grand prizes of a $1million or a million dollar vacation home are enticing. But I’m more of the realistic kind – I’m more likely to win the $25 grocery card than anything else offered as prizes.

Today, after spending almost an hour on opening a three-inch thick stack of playing pieces, I threw away the game board, the hundreds of playing pieces that were duplicates of those I already had. All that work and I didn’t gain any new pieces!  My board was filled with all but one in each prize level.

I was just one away from winning something! Anything!

I have to admit, if I had “won” the five dollar grocery gift card or cash after all those weeks of tearing, sorting and organizing the pieces in numerical order, I probably would have shoved it somewhere on some unsuspecting store employee.

So I shoved that dark and demented side of me back down in its Pandora’s Box and said ‘NO MORE’!

I reminded myself that I actually avoided it last time the game was offered because the same thing happened – nothing, nada, zilch.

It’s also the same reason that I stopped collecting the stamps for free or discounted dinnerware or the time cookware was offered. By the time you added up how much it would cost in grocery purchases to get the entire set, I had to spend thousands of dollars in groceries.

For two people, that wasn’t gonna happen.

So this time, I have taken a solemn vow to myself that no longer will I let those savvy advertising jerks in a skyscraper yank my chain over board games with empty promises or reach for what I cannot achieve unless I spend oodles of money.

I’m resetting my brain – control..alt..delete.