The prize that's just around the corner

I read on a forum about someone who entered 17,000 competitions last year and won 83 prizes. First of all - 17,000?! When did they eat, sleep, look up, grey-faced and twitching from their laptop keyboard to acknowledge the real world? But we'll callously gloss over the addiction issues to consider the point that struck me even harder: where's the ROI on that? It's around a 0.5% success rate, hours and hours of completing online forms with personal details you wouldn't normally dream of handing out to a global conglomerate in order to receive a load of junk mail, just because of the slim chance you might win a whale-watching trip to Ireland or a gas-fuelled barbeque or bust-firming cream. Not that these are freebies that I'd turn down, and thus a few months ago I joined the comping ranks and can exclusively report that I too have a 0.5% success rate. I've entered around 400 competitions and won some cereal and a book of poetry. And before you scoff, it was a box of organic ginger flakes and the collected works of Seamus Heaney. A cut above, I'm sure you'll agree... but, yes, hardly a £5000 vintage bed (my personal favourite prize) or a brand new car. I'm working up to that.

And there's the problem. I call them competitions but the vast majority are prize draws (and I include in this category those that ask you to "answer the question below that we've already answered for you"). No skill is required, only luck and luck is just statistics. My marketing friends (who got me obsessed in the first place) assure me that not as many people enter competitions as you might expect, but clearly every other competitor reduces your own chances - and there are a lot of other obsessives out there (as the 17,000-a-year habit demonstrates). My husband tells me it's a mug's game, and of course it is - but one that plays on your dreams and aspirations, so is therefore one that gets you while you're down at the expense of promises to friends and associates, the business research I should be doing, the constructive ways of spending my spare time that are waiting for me. But it doesn't stop me - just one more, just until I win, just until I win again.

Choose your own cliche: Life is a gamble, you're always striving for the prize that never comes, enjoy what you've got, use your time wisely. All true, all wise, all easy to say and hard - so hard - to apply.