The wonderful world of the tricky tray
Apart from jughandles, another “oddity” in New Jersey is this thing called a tricky tray. Being from Connecticut, I have never heard of a tricky tray.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, I lost my virginity to this new experience.
The whole concept of this event is that you pay money to get a certain amount of tickets. (Entrance fee for the one I went to was $9.00 and you got 25 tickets.) With these tickets you place ‘bids’ on items with them, by putting them in a bag for that item. The items consisted of anything from gift certificates, to free bowling, to food. You can by more tickets to bid on these items. Of course, you can bid on more than one once per item, which gives you a better chance to win it.
Besides these basic items there are other tables with more expensive items. Those tables cost more money to buy tickets for. Each table was a different color – blue, white, orange, yellow, and green.
After putting all my numbers in, I sat there waiting for them to start pulling numbers.
From what I saw, a tricky tray, to some people, is like bingo. There were people there that bought a TON of tickets and must’ve put bids on everything they saw. They even took all of their tickets and taped them on large pieces of cardboard so they could see every number at once!
Then they start drawing numbers. They take each item and start picking a number for that prize and give it to the winner.
This lasted for a good two hours of numbers being called and prizes being given out. All in all, I won…….. NOTHING! Of course, it would have been more fun if I won something, but at least I know that the money goes to help my son’s school. That’s the main reason of doing this.
So, my experience with the tricky tray wasn’t that impressive. Firstly, the prizes weren’t the best around. Thought that they were going to be better. I spoke to a couple of people there and was told that the prizes they had last year were much better than this. Secondly, I’m not going to get there right when it opens. They opened the door 2 hours before they drew numbers. I was done bidding within an hour and had nothing to do but sit there and wait. Next time I go I think I’ll show up about an hour or so before the actual drawing.
I heard that there was a much better tricky tray that happens in the springtime. I guess I’ll have to wait another six months to see how that one is.
