The Brewers have been running a promotion called “Where’s Bernie?”, Bernie being the team’s mascot. Over the past week or so they’ve been hiding mini-Bernie lawn statues in county parks around the state, and today was the day the hunt for them began. Starting at 5:00 this morning you could go out in the parks and look for the “stach”-ues (Bernie’s got a big handlebar mustache), taking one if you found them. They were placing 1,400 total – 400 of them were spread out across all the parks they chose and had prizes attached (game tickets, game-used merch, zoo passes, etc.), and the remaining 1,000 were all in one location which was not announced until this morning. Bernie had been leaving clues on Twitter as to what parks were going to contain the “stach”-ues, but the location with the big 1,000 lot wasn’t revealed until 5:00 am today.
Now here’s the kicker. The 1,000 Bernies weren’t supposed to be available to get until 7:00 am today. They announced the location at 5:00 when the rest of the scavenger hunt began, but you couldn’t grab these Bernies until 7:00 (the 1,000 Bernies did not have any prizes attached, they were just plain). As I was getting ready for work I checked out the Brewers site to see where the secret location was, and I was excited to see that the 1,000 Bernies were going to be placed in the lakefront parks downtown, really easy to get to from our house. Sweet! No way were we getting up at 4:30 to try to find a park to start looking for lawn ornaments at 5:00, but we’d said last night that if the big stash happened to be near us and we could stop on the way to work we’d give it a shot. So we hurried to get ready, dropped D off at daycare about half an hour early, and headed down to the lakefront to nab a Bernie. We got there around 6:50, plenty of time to spare, and we even saw a Brewers van with a guy in it. Awesome! We’ll get a Bernie for sure.
Um, not so much. We stopped by the Brewers van as another man and his young son were talking to the guy in it, and R hopped out to see how this was going to work. Well, turns out they’d already given away all the Bernies. And it wasn’t even 7:00 yet! What?? That’s not fair – all the press on this explicitly stated in bold and underlined that the 1,000 Bernies were not available to grab until 7:00 am (bold and underlined?! that means it must be so!). That totally sucks! So we drove down the lakefront a little further to where a big Brewers truck and Bernie himself were stationed. A big truck – they must have more Bernies there! Nope, they were gone too. WTF??
We were so annoyed. I mean, I know it’s not a huge deal; they are just plastic lawn ornaments after all. But it would’ve been a fun Brewers souvenir to have (not in the yard, mind you!), and we followed the rules like they’d asked! If I read it once I read it a million times throughout all the tweets and clues leading up to this – you won’t be able to pick up Bernies from the secret location until 7:00 am, and if you find more than one please be nice to other Brewers fans and only take that one. So who played nice? Apparently no one, not even the Brewers people themselves! If you’re going to hype this all up, make these rules, and then emphasize them so much, at least follow them yourselves so the rest of us who are trying to play your game have a shot at success. Don’t say ah well, people are already here early and trying to cheat so we may as well just let them win. That’s not how it goes. I don’t care if there was a camp of 8,000 people overnight hoping they were in the right spot for the secret 1,000 Bernies. We followed instructions, we looked up the location, we were there before 7:00, and yet you catered to everyone else. Way to instill trust in your fans, shitheads.
And the worst part? People already have these up on eBay. I just saw one for sale for $500! What?! These things were free you greedy bastards!
So the Brewers get a big thumbs down for their “Where’s Bernie?” game. What could have been a really fun community event was turned into a big fat failure by all the cheaters and those who allowed them to cheat. If you were one of the lucky ones who actually followed the clues to a park to find a Bernie with loot attached, or got down to the lakefront half an hour early to grab a plain Bernie when the jerks gave them out before they were supposed to, then bully for you. But leave it to people to ruin it for the rest of us. *sigh*
