“A decade ago, I was entering about 50 contests a month by mail,” recalls Weth. “Now it’s seven or eight a month by mail, and about 50 a day online.” Weth spends one or two hours a day, on his lunch break or after his audio-engineering job, perusing a set of bookmarked sites, including online-sweepstakes.com.
“Weth might otherwise be a compulsive gambler,” Weth explained in a recent e-mail. (See what I mean about that third-person thing?) “Entering contests gives the same sort of adrenaline rush that gambling does,” but without the risk of financial loss, he says. “Now that most all contests can be entered online, Weth doesn’t even spend that much on postage anymore.”
The Internet ignited his contesting career, and he continued to win: a hairy-armpit keychain, a freezer with 242 pounds of Dreyer’s ice cream, a trip to the Soul Train music awards in Los Angeles. Eventually, Weth had amassed more than the two-bedroom Mission Hill apartment he shared with Gisselbrecht could handle. “For every awesome prize I won [like the recently awarded $400 toward concert tickets of his choosing],” Weth recalls, “I also got hundreds of T-shirts and hats.” His increasingly enormous collection of winnings soon became a subject of domestic arguments.
“We fought constantly about stuff,” says Gisselbrecht. “I’d say, ‘I don’t want 47 baseball caps when neither of us has ever worn one!’ ” Still, he understood Weth’s compulsion. “This is stuff he feels a connection with,” he says. “So, we had to buy a ridiculously big house so we didn’t have to break up.”
When Weth wins, we all win
Weth wins often, but collecting prizes is not his goal. He’s a prize philanthropist of sorts, and he’s constantly giving things away — books and DVDs to his friends, kids’ stuff to Toys for Tots. He couldn’t even let me leave his house without a bag of assembled goodies.
Several years ago, when he won a trip to Nashville and Gisselbrecht was unable to accompany him, Weth was forced to choose a lucky friend to be his traveling companion — and thus the joys of contesting turned meta. He had a friend set up a Web site, winwithweth.com, where he now re-prizes things he’s won. He asks friends to submit haikus or limericks, based on self-appointed themes, and awards prizes accordingly.
Weth also spreads the word about his contests and winnings on the Boston-based message board Lemmingtrail, where his postings — including details about a year’s worth of free shows at Great Scott — have themselves won a sort of cult following. “[T]his is probably my favorite thread ever!”, Lemmingtrail user danshea noted. “KUDOS! to you and your mission!”
“Last year Weth had a Summer Haiku Contest [Weth’s Summer Haiku Madness Contest Series],” says Roger Lussier, another Lemmingtrail user, “which was based on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues. To win, you had to submit a haiku (in standard 5/7/5 format) that related to the prize,” a .51-carat un-mounted diamond. Lussier’s entry — “OMG I WANT/GIMME GIMME GIMME PLEASE/MINE ALL MINE ALL MINE” — successfully and hilariously tackled the concept.
On a page titled “Weth Wins in 2007!”, Weth posted all his winnings for that year in a set format, with a knowing cheekiness, even specifying whether or not he’d be giving the prize away on his Web site. Example, from early this past year:
