so i’ve had this credit card for about 3 years now, just a shitty chase card with a $2000 limit, and after 3 years of looking at statements every month i finally noticed something.  i had accumulated 3,748 “points.”  i was like “say WHAAAAA?!” and immediately scoured the statement for any fine print that said i had to become a member of their secret club in order to redeem them.

no fine print.  i did find out that each dollar spent equals one point though.  i was conflicted between “cool, i got 3,748 points” and “fuck, i spent 3,748 dollars on NOTHING!”  which is not entirely true, it pretty much paid for trips to sweden, vegas, a lot of burritos and that hotel in denver with the bed that i peed in.

anyway, after forgetting about it for a few days, this morning i finally logged on to chase.com/rewards.  i’m all thinking “sweet, i had no idea i had this for 3 years and i’ve got a lot of points to spend!  i wonder what i can get with that many points?!”  in my mind, since i paid a dollar for each point, i figured “hey, it’s only fair that each point is worth a dollar, right?”

i dove into the prize section, eagerly anticipating a snazzy new HDTV or all expense paid trip to the island from LOST or some kind of record deal.  what i found was much, much less impressive.  it was essentially an online store full of free gifts from banks.  yes, the gifts they give you for opening a checking account.  basketball, quesadilla maker, tool set, the whole fucking bag.

i nearly shit myself out of pure disappointment.  i’m paying back all this debt and they’re going to send me a goddamn basketball.  THANKS CHASE, FUCK YOU TOO. luckily, there was a section for gift cards.  they had a mildly diverse selection of stores, including target, borders/barnes & noble, sears, amazon.com, bath & body works, staples, and mrs. fields.  i finally settled on a $25 best buy gift card, which cost 3000 points.  i guess that’s not so bad.  now i finally have a reason to get up in the morning.

the shittiest part is that i was browsing the gift cards because they went as low as $5 and i thought maybe i could score some cookies from mrs. fields with my remaining 748 points.  NOPE.  a $5 gift card to a cookie store costs 1000 points, so essentially $1000.  even more wacky was the fact that the $4000 quesadilla maker was “out of stock.”

apparently i know nothing about the real world.