My employer has recently gotten all into “employee health”, mostly in the form of nagging us about what we’re eating. Probably they’re hoping to save on health care costs, but they’re spinning it as “we’re concerned about those of you we haven’t laid off or outsourced yet”. One of the things they’ve done is put “Healthy Choice” stickers on the least objectionable things in the vending machine.
The other day, I noticed that beside the vending machine, they’d put these redemption coupons, where if you collect 3 “Healthy Choice” stickers and stuck them to the coupon, you could redeem it for a free Healthy Choice snack. Hey, I thought, one free snack every 4 days, that sounds like a good idea. Then I read the fine print: you can only redeem the coupons on the first thursday of the month, at the cafeteria, between 11:30 and 12:30. I’m surprised there wasn’t a “beware of the tiger” sign involved in the process somewhere. I’m sure the process was carefully designed to discourage people from redeeming them.
So rather than save up my coupons, and suddenly one day a month having a vast armload of free snacks, I started peeling my stickers off at the vending machines, sticking them to coupons, and leaving them there for others to take. My lead was soon followed, and now every day there are several of these coupons full of stickers, waiting for somebody with a different sense of time spent versus reward gained to try to redeem them. I hope that person walks in on that appointed day with hundreds of these things.
