How The Test Was Won And Where It Got Us

March 18th, 2004 Posted in 2004

If you’ve ever won anything in Canada–a new car; a free cup of coffee; even a pair of my crusty socks (assuming you participated in Jay’s Ultimate Giveaway Crusty Sock Sweepstake Spectacular)–then you’re familiar with something called the Skill-Testing Question.

Since it’s only applied in Canada, I’ll take a second to explain what the hell it is. Listen up, Americans, I’m only going to say this once. You too, Australia. Don’t think I don’t see you passing notes in the back.

Here t’is: for every McDonald’s Scratch-N’Get-Fat! Giveaway or Tim Horton’s coffee promotion in Canada, your winning ticket will have a skill-testing question on the back, which you legally need to solve before McDonalds gives you burger one. Calling it a “skill-testing” question is a bit of a misnomer, actually. Most are just basic math questions ([10 x 2]—5=_________, for instance). You’re only going to have trouble with a question like this if you spent every day in Grade 5 math class picking brains out of your skull through your nostril.

Even if it turns out you’re hopelessly stupid, however, McDonalds won’t discriminate against you. I scratched at a ticket that came with my receipt while waiting for my Big Mac a while back, and when I won free fries the cashier handed me a pen and said “Can you write 26 on the back please, sir?” I’ll admit this could be considered a bit of a skill-testing question in itself–Can I? Doubt sets in–but on the whole, McDonald’s isn’t as immensely concerned about challenging you with arithmetic as they’d lead you to believe. In fact, McDonalds doesn’t really give a shit if you drove there in a moped covered with unicorn stickers and paid them in boxes of UNICEF pennies. If you have a pulse, McDonalds will give you an irregular one.

It’s somewhat touching, I suppose, that McDonalds is so idiot-friendly. (Though to be fair, if McDonalds discriminated against the stupid they’d have no one left to design their ad campaigns. I’m Lovin’ That latest one!)

Anyway, if the skill-testing questions aren’t actually honing our skills to deadly Mensa points, what is their purpose? why do Canadians have to fill the damn things out in the first place? Here’s why.

As it turns out, it’s illegal to have a lottery without a license in Canada–presumably because just about the only people who make money from lotteries are, well, lotteries. Not licensing them is like giving people permission to print stacks of money in their backyards. Conversely, licensing and strictly regulating lotteries stops Joe and Jane LottoScam from getting rich off the sorts of people who buy lottery tickets–a unique breed of idiot either unwilling or unable to comprehend what “odds” are, and who will give you handfuls of money until they die if you tell them you have a special-plus extra-lucky prize for them under your desk.

Obviously the Government feels the need to step in and stop this, or the money would go to someone who isn’t them. This pisses Governments off. To prevent this, the Government makes getting a lottery license a complicated hassle, under government mandate that everything they do in some way makes taxpayers’ lives a complicated hassle.

Enter McDonalds, who strolls into Canada with bags full of barely edible food and a sackful of dreams to make a Scratch-N-Win burger promotion. But because they’re technically giving away burgers through chance alone, it’s considered a form of lottery, which means the Canadian government can demand ungodly amounts of cash from McDonalds, which they can then invest in more laws forcing Canadians to mail them all their money.

McDonalds, no stranger to gouging and immoral business practices itself, tells the Canadian government to go fuck a beaver, and sics its enormous mountain of attorneys on the Canadian Criminal Code. Hence the skill-testing question, which adds the illusion of skill into McDonald’s burger lottos so they’re no longer games of chance.

Fucking ridiculous, am I right? But before you roll your eyes at Canada, damn Yankees, keep in mind that this sort of eye-crossing hypocrisy exists everywhere. For instance, gambling is illegal in Iowa because gambling is a vice, and thus bad. So Iowa passed a law legalizing the riverboat in 1989, under the rationale that the place where the gambling happens is on the water, making it imaginary in the eyes of God.

At first riverboat laws were harshly Draconian, only allowing a set limit on bids and certain amounts of time you could gamble for. Iowa, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, Indiana, and Missouri quickly followed suit.

Riverboats, let’s make this clear, sucked. Iowan government never let you forget that you were committing religious hate crime by gambling, and were thus an irretreivable bastard. They simply kicked you out to sea and took all your money while they did it. Lacking any alternatives, gamblers flocked to Iowa’s smug little riverboats in droves, willing to put up with the vise-like controls on gambling and drinking for the chance to give strangers free money. (Once you’d gambled a set amount for a set time, for instance, you were forced to just hang around the boat until it ran its circuit and docked four hours later. Your only recourse here would be, logically, to get drunk off your ass–a decision made more challenging, sadly, by the one drink you were allowed to get drunk off your ass with).

But then something happened. Other states began legalizing gambling altogether, the athiest commie bastards; then the Native Americans threw in their hats, the Godless swine; and before long Iowa’s riverboat scam started to look like the complicated hassle it so assuredly was.

Today riverboats still have to be in the water, but most are moored permanently to docks or float in a thin puddle nowhere near a river. Faced with a choice between piousness and tourism, Iowan legislators decided to gamble on vice, abandoning all the time limits, betting limits and stupidity in favor of not losing all their tourist dollars to Native casinos.

The only holdout from the early days of riverboat gambling is that riverboats still technically have to sail around actual rivers. Riverboat owners naturally told the Iowan government to go fuck a beaver when they heard this, then sic’d their enormous mountain of attorneys on the legislation. Riverboats currently “cruise” the rivers between the hours of 4 and 6am, for about three or four months a year, thus giving them the illusion of being seafaring vessels.

Fucking ridiculous, am I right? I haven’t even gotten started on Prohibition, but even these two examples sort of illustrate the moral here: it doesn’t matter whether you make a law for the good of the community or because God told you blackjack makes Jesus cry: McDonalds, in league with the gambling lobby, will still crush you like a fucking bug regardless, in front of witnesses, and no one will bat a goddamn eye. Don’t cross those guys, man.