.....Really?

I have excellent credit. It's no accident. I work hard for my hard credit. I have a few credit cards that give me "points" or "rewards" for my spending. They try to scam you in to using your credit to buy everyday things like food and gas so you can get bigger "rewards." I am not so gullible. What I am gullible about is that my hard earned points will actually give me something cool for keeping my credit in tact and giving these companies my responsible and consistent business over the past few years. Most particularly my MasterCard which I have had for almost 8 years now. Over the last 8 years I have charged up and paid off over $16,000 on one card. I know this because I have earned 16,000+ points and today I decided to "cash in" those points. I haven't touched them thinking that by now I surely must have built up to something pretty cool and/or useful. Oh how quickly I learned how wrong I am. I got on to the site and started checking items that I could "purchase" with my points. Nothing too fancy or crazy. All the good stuff was in the 30,000+ points range. Some notables were a 5 mega pixel digital camera (okay, not too shabby, mine's only got 4.5 mega pixels. back when I bought mine 5 mega pixels was top of the line. you couldn't get more than 5, but I digress) a designer purse and an ipod shuffle. Well none of that seemed appealing so I started looking at the travel options. First I check Hawaii (that's my next trip ambition) but all those tickets were worth 50,000 points. You can't get a plane ticket to motherfucking Detroit for less than 30,000 points. Really? Detroit? Who the hell goes to Detroit who doesn't have to go to visit family? So then I check some hotels in Vegas. I love Vegas and surely I have earned a free night at Mandalay Bay or somewhere cool. Oh how wrong I was again. Basically what it all comes down to is if you want to get cool free shit you'd better already have spent $50,000. Well if I could afford to spend $50,000 on anything I think I'd have already flown to Hawaii and stayed at Mandalay and wouldn't think going there for free was any big deal. But what do I know, I can't even afford to fly to Detroit, the arm pit of America. What can you get? Well I'm glad you asked. Apparently my $16,000 earns me that 5 mega pixel camera but Chad can walk in to Best Buy right now and purchase a 7.2 mega pixel camera for $109 (and he did and I'm going to tomorrow.) Really? I could have bought 145 cameras for $16,000! I could have flown to Hawaii 32 times by now and I could have stayed at Mandalay Bay 44 times. Stupid MasterCard motherfuckers. Don't even get me started on Discover.