Forget the $7,000 cookware

A three-day hotel stay in Mexico isn't worth the three hours these people had to spend with this guy while he demonstrated his over-inflated wares.

When I was about 9 or 10, my parents were accosted in a drugstore in Fort Lauderdale, where we were vacationing, and offered the unique opportunity of a free trip to the Everglades in exchange for listening to a sales pitch. I don't even know if they were told about the sales pitch; perhaps it was just billed as a free trip to the Everglades. In any event, I recall them being excited about the trip--the poor dupes--and we all dutifully gathered outside our motel the following day for a chance to experience nature red in tooth and claw.

There we were herded onto a bus with other families and taken across the state via Alligator Alley than which there is no more boring stretch of road, with the possible exception of the Jersey Turnpike. This, on an overcast and occasionally drizzly day, was our trip to the Everglades. Now, Alligator Alley does indeed run through the Everglades, but I've never seen an alligator there. I've never seen anything there but mosquitos. Generally, it looks like this for about 100 miles. Monotonous, flat, boring. I won't say this was my worst trip across Florida--that occurred during college when we ran out of gas in the middle of Alligator Alley at around midnight--but it was close.

We were headed to Cape Coral, at that time a mostly undeveloped town on the west coast of Florida. Once we got there we all tromped around the rain looking at the incipient community. Then we were herded into some kind of cafeteria/auditorium, given a boxed lunch and subjected to hours of sales talks meant to encourage people to "get in on the ground floor" of this fantastic opportunity to purchase as-yet-developed houses.

Boring as that was, the worst part was that we were essentially prisoners: We had no transportation out of there; we had to stay and hear every last sales pitch. And then we had to stay some more while they passed out sales agreements, pamphlets, etc. and tried to talk people into filling them out. Inevitably, some people did fill them out, further delaying our escape from this living hell. Finally we boarded the bus again, drove across Alligator Alley in the now-driving rain and arrived back at our hotel in the dark. An entirely wasted day.

The ultimate irony: My father got a job on the west coast of Florida about five years later. And my mother soon after got a job in Cape Coral. I guess they really were offering them a unique opportunity.

Via Instapundit.