Round numbers

So there’s this contest Pepsi and Apple are running. Certain bottles of Pepsi products have yellow caps and in 1/3 of the yellow caps have codes in them that are able to be traded in for free song downloads at the iTunes Music Store.

I’ve been playing it since it started. Turns out that, by tipping the bottles back, it’s actually pretty easy to tell if the cap is a winner or not. After a few misses, I got to the point where I could win every single time.

I normally like Diet Vanilla Coke, or Diet Coke with Lime, but I figured that if I’m going to be drinking soda anyway, might as well be building up downloads at the iTunes Music Store, right?

For a while, I was winning at least once a day. But after a while, I think the word got out about the game, and all the stores I frequented ran out of Diet Pepsis with winning yellow caps. And then they ran out of any Diets with yellow caps at all. And Diet Pepsi was the only diet product that had the yellow caps.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been stuck at 29 free songs to download. That un-round number, just one away from a nice even 30… man, it nagged at me. I even started looking under the non-diet Pepsi products, but by the time I gave in, there weren’t any winners among the non-diet drinks, either. Argh.

So, today, at work, I was helping another tech in the basement of some County building, scrounging up power cords (don’t ask) and we entered a musty old room and turned on the light…

And there were two empty pop bottles, left behind by someone else. One of them, a Diet Pepsi with a yellow cap.

I scooped it up, unscrewed the cap… and, yep, there was a winning code!

Whoo-HOO! We have a WINNAH!

Hellooooooooo, thirty downloads!