Obnoxiously loud. That's how I would characterize my new vacuum cleaner. I got the little beast as a gift for subscribing to local newspaper (appropriately titled The Straits Times in a country which still considers homosexuality illegal). It seems to be very common over here to bundle all kinds of unrelated gifts or add-ons to a product or a service. And it seems to be working as an advertisement tactics as it is attracting the crowds. It took me more than 2 months to receive my vacuum cleaner due to "unforeseen interest in this particular gift".
So far I have also received a camera for signing up for a mobile subscription and won years worth of ice cream from a Hobbit movie contest (Yei!). The similarity between all of these gifts has been that there is more or less same redemption scheme behind them. With the received redemption letter I need to find my way to typically some far away (as much of a far away places as there can be on this small island) redemption center between 9-5 on Monday through Friday. In one case it was 2 tiered redemption sending me from one industrial area to another. The vacuum cleaner was luckily available from the city but from a 3rd party company that seems to be providing only these gift redemptions for other companies. They had a stack of the vacuum cleaners and various other weird stuff behind the counters.
I wonder if they have intentionally made it hard to redeem these gifts -- I mean, why couldn't they just send them over through regular mail -- to decrease the number of people actually receiving the gifts. For corporations it would be a minimal save, but save none the less. Then again there are stingy individuals like me running half the city after El Cheapo vacuum cleaner. Furthermore, I just recently invested in not exactly a cheapo pair of noise cancelling headphones, so I can have them cancelling out all the infernal racket the machine is making while cleaning the floors from all gecko droppings.
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