One morning in January a friend of Amber's told her about an airline that she and her boyfriend purchased cheap flights to Las Vegas on. Amb immediately called me and told me about it and by that afternoon we had booked tickets to go to Vegas at the end of the month. Kinda random but it was a great deal at $280 per person for our round trip flight plus three nights stay at Excalibur. January 29th came upon us and Amb and I headed down to Eugene where we picked up Amber's friend Tara and her boyfriend Brian. That evening we departed from Eugene and embarked on our first adventure to Sin City.
After checking-in at the front desk we made our way to our rooms. Along the way a nicely dressed gentleman approached us and asked if we were planning on seeing any shows while we were in town. We said "yeah we hoped too" as we had heard great things about the Cirque Du Soleil. He said he could get us great prices on tickets, and that we just had to listen to a short presentation, aka timeshare presentation, and they would treat us to a free lunch with drinks while we were there. Cheap tickets, free lunch and drinks, hmm why not. The tickets we chose were for the magician Criss Angel "Believe". We were able to get tickets for all four of us for a total of $118. Since Amber and I had started it we were the ones who had to go listen to the timeshare presentation. The salesman promised us that the presentation was a max of two hours and that all we had to say is that we weren't interested when it came time to buy. Little did we know it wouldn't workout anything like that. The timeshare would begin the following afternoon at 1pm. We completed the paperwork and headed up to our rooms to enjoy our first night on the glamoring city.
That first night we hit it a little harder than we had first planned and found ourselves partying it up with a couple guys from Kansas we met walking through New York, New York. We headed to a few clubs with them and versus paying for $10 drinks to save money we mixed our own drinks in the back of the bar with our $15 pint of some terrible whiskey.
We woke up the next morning and hiked our butts up to the North end of the strip and saw about every tourist attraction there is to see on the strip. One o'clock came around and we made it back to the hotel just in time to catch our ride to the timeshare presentation. There we jumped on a shuttle bus with 30 other people who were suckered into getting cheap tickets, and rode the shuttle bus to our destination a few miles down the strip where we unloaded like a bunch of cattle into a waiting room full of chairs.
We could tell right off that this place was going to be weird. It instantly had the feeling of a used car dealership with trashy people working there just wearing some nice clothes to cover their nipple rings and tattoos. After patiently waiting for 15 mins we met our worst nightmare, Dallas Applebee, just her name made us dislike her. She walked us outside where we stopped near the edge of the building so she could take a few drags off of her cancer stick while we inhaled her second hand smoke. Our amazing tour guide Ms. Applebee began digging into Amber and I with questions about what we do, where were from, etc. Her voice was enough to make us pull out our hair. Its the kind of sound that you would get if you mixed the screaming of a crow and the sound of fingernails on the chalk board. We could barely stand to listen to her, but we remained polite. After she felt she had exposed us to enough cancer causing agents she threw her cigeratte on the ground and led us into a neighboring building. Inside we were surprised to see 80-100 tables of disgruntled people who were all cheap like us and decided they would save a few bucks by listening to a '2 hour' presentation. I quote '2 hour' because as we would soon find out that sly fellow at the ticket sales desk evidently couldn't tell time. The wonderful Ms. Applebee led us to a small table with three chairs where we would end up spending the worst 4 1/2 hours of ourlife. She offered us to get some food before we sat down, and we eagerly accepted as we hadn't ate all day in anticipation for the lunch and drinks that the tickets salesman had promised. We made our way over to the lunch counter to find out that the lunch we had waited for was a small piece of room temperature sandwhich from a platter that had been picked apart by the other folks who had also delayed their lunches in hopes of a good meal at the presentation. We each picked up a piece of small sandwhich threw off the soggy warm tomatoes, grabbed our 4oz styrofoam cup of pink lemonade and headed back to the table.
Our energetic new found friend Ms. Dallas Applebee began inquiring about the top four places that we would like to travel to in ourlives. We were slow to respond as we didn't have any idea. She kept probbing and probbing, and finally we just began listing off places on the globe "Africa, Austrailia" etc. Dallas then asked "Why haven't you went there?" I replied "Well because of the cost mainly I would suppose." She in turn said "Well what if money didn't matter?" To which I responded "But money does matter." She again responded "But if money wasn't an object would you go?" "Well yes" I responded "but money is an object." "But what if it weren't?" she said. And again I replied "But it is." We continued this merry-go-round for a few more minutes until I finally just gave in to her and said "Okay, what are you looking for?" She said "We are going to be together for the next 2 1/2 hours and we should make this time together as fun as possible because she has fun no matter what she does in life." Which she followed up with the greatest sales pitch of all time "It obvious that I don't like you two, and that you don't like me, but this program is a good deal." We were both taken back by her professionalism, or lack there of. For the next two hours we politely sat at her table listening to her ramble on about the amazing vacations that she had went on, and where she was going to go next, and why she owned three timeshares herself. All of which we had a difficult time believeing seeing that she looked like she slept under the overpass the night before with her messy hair, long dirty half painted fingernails, teeth that hadn't seen a dentist since Columbus set sail, and her 1984 suite jacket she picked up from the Goodwill on her way to work.
After she finished telling us about how amazing she was and how "We would never stay at the places where she can stay." She followed up her sales pitch with "I can tell you guys can't afford this." To which we politely asked "How much does it cost?" "We will get to that later" she replied. Now that she had earned our greatest of respect she escorted us out of the building to the parking lot to her gold 1986 Buick LeSabre. We piled into the back of the car and quickly observed her "Hot Stud" half naked hunk air freshener. She drove us further south down the strip to their newest Las Vegas timeshare resort. We toured the property which was very nice, with its beautiful pool, and luxurious rooms. After she quickly walked us through the resort "since we couldn't afford it", we headed to her car and back to the feeding frenzy at their office.
Now 3 hours in we were introduced to the finance person. He was a tall clean african american man in his mid-fifties, who would spend the next half hour explaining to us the cost of owning a timeshare. He explained to us that this timeshare resort would cost us $42,000 dollars with $15,000 down and $800 per month to enjoy the resorts one week per year. We quickly declined. He inquired as to why? "Why? Well because thats incredibly expensive." I said. He then offered us to sign up for the program at $11,000 with $5,000 down. Which again we declined. The gentleman thanked us for ourtime and left to go get the always amazing Dallas Applebee.
When Dallas arrived back at the table she picked up the paper which he had used to write down the prices on and looked at it then looked at us and said "Wow, this must be rocket science" (implying that we were dumb for not signing up, because it was such an amazing deal).
We said our goodbyes to our favorite tour guide Ms. Applebee, filled out some paper work and were escorted to a nearby room where we thought we would get our tickets. In the next room we found another lady who was going to give us a survey which started out fine, but then she tried to sell us on the program again. We repeatedly declined, until she finally escorted us into the next room, where we were introduced to another woman, who gave us another survey, and finally gave us our vouchers so we could go to the Criss Angel ticket counter and finally get our tickets. After filling out the comment card with a few unfriendly words, we exited the office and entered another shuttle full of pissed off people who had just wasted their afternoon in Las Vegas. If it wasn't enough that we had all just been beat to death by sales people we then got the luxury of riding with the only bus driver in Vegas who thought taking the freeway would be a great idea during rush hour traffic, versus driving a couple miles up the strip. Lets just say we had plenty of time to get aquainted with the other passengers. Oh and hmm... how could it be rush hour traffic one might ask when you arrived at the timeshare presentation at one o'clock and the salesman promised it was only 2 hours long, oh yeah thats right because we are now 4 hours into it, it's 5 o'clock.
30 mins later we arrived at the hotel and headed to the Criss Angel ticket counter to turn in our vouchers so we could finally get our tickets. Sadly when we arrived at the counter we found out that we were going to be sitting in the very last row against the wall, and to make things even more amazing we found out the tickets were only $56 dollars to buy them there, so we waisted our entire first day in Vegas so we could save $40.
We love you Dallas Applebee.
