Chocolate Is King: A terrible Thanksgiving tale.

I’m not new to inappropriate Thanksgiving tales, but a decade ago, after significant professional degradation during this time of giving thanks, I discovered that chocolate was king and some people just deserve the side-eye.

At the time, my job was creating content for clients at a marketing and website company. This company no longer exists (nor does the client’s business I am about to discuss), but I swear I had nothing to do with that turn of events. As part of my job, I was tasked to serve as a social media manager for several clients. I was responsible for creating Facebook posts filled with things no one cared about, if I’m honest. Social media isn’t where we go to get excited about Bob’s Auto Parts’ latest post on widget grease. It’s where we troll, polarize, and shame our families by arguing with people in the community we’ll eventually run into at the store.

We don’t think much about it today, with our social media having become little more than ad vending machines, but a decade ago it was different, and businesses weren’t so much buying ads as trying to snag eyeballs with actual content. We pushed clients to have blogs, write about their area of expertise, and share those posts, along with other related outside content, to stay front and center in people’s feeds. But much like today, unless you’ve given your business over to dank memes or cat videos, most serious business pages have little of interest to offer folks who want to argue or share false Abraham Lincoln quotes to support their MLM.

My job meant I spent hours dragging the internet for content ideas related to client industries, writing blog posts for some of them who wanted nothing to do with promoting their business in this new era of online marketing.

There were no influencers in that day, not really. This was the innocent era when we thought that if you created original and carefully curated content, it would be like a digital Field of Dreams: building it meant they would come.

Some clients were easy to work with, and I quickly gained a sense of what content they preferred. They trusted me to publish it with less input from them, allowing me to work efficiently without having to run everything by them for approval. I was pleased to see their social followers and engagement grow naturally.

Other clients were not fun to work with. At all. They whipped the horses forward while keeping the brake on.

One client in particular stood out. Not only was I frequently reminded that they were from an important family with money and important social standing in the community, but their somewhat haughty manner made it impossible for me to do a good job. I’d spend extra time finding content suitable for their business social feed, only to be told they didn’t like the ads on the page.

“I can’t control the ads,” I would tell them.

“Find something else.”

Unable to find an ad-free internet, I wracked my brain to come up with clever ideas that would make their business stand out from the others. I spent evenings in my apartment writing down ideas, sketching, creating fun cartoon graphics—time that should have been mine, but I was giving to this one problem client because I could not crack the nut. Their business was in an industry people love to avoid and not think about, so building engagement was really difficult.

Plus, they kinda worked against the advice they were paying us to give them.

“You need to let your customers know about your Facebook page,” we’d say.

“No, that’s tacky.”

“At least include your website on your business card.”

“Our customers don’t need to know about that. They are already customers.”

They rejected my content and ideas half the time, so I was spending double the time finding things for them to review just to get the correct percentage approved. I wrote blog posts for their website to share on their Facebook page, and scripts for short informational videos we hired to be shot at their business—no joy. It was as if they wanted huge success but would not take the advice of the professionals they had paid to provide it.

My bosses eventually decided we’d no longer offer social media management services, to my great joy, and we began wrapping up the final months of client work by training them to do their own social media. Most embraced it, and I was confident of their success.

But not the problem client.

And this is how contests come into the picture.

The lack of engagement with published social content will inevitably lead to the idea of a contest. It’s that last-ditch effort of bribery: we’ll give you something if you just look our way. The catch-22 is that contests require a large number of followers and engagement to be effective. Without that, contests actually exacerbate the problem. A contest basically lets the world know that we have Dodgson over here, and no one cares. The crickets are never louder than when you demand the animals to roar.

This wasn’t the first contest idea they’d had, mind you. I don’t know if having lots of money plants the idea that you can buy people’s loyalty or what. The first contest was giving away a Blu-ray player, and it went as poorly as could be expected, leaving me with a Friday filled with several angry calls of how I’d done it wrong.

But they wanted to try again, for Thanksgiving, one last time before social media assistance was done.

“I don’t think a contest is a good idea,” I said to the client, weary of dealing with them and wanting to wrap it up. “Let’s focus on how you can take over the social media account.”

“No, we want another contest.”

“I don’t think Facebook rules allow for you to exchange engagement for a prize,” I said, explaining they’d put in some new rules to prevent businesses from basically buying followers.

“We want a contest.”

The compromise was to write a blog post about the contest and share it on Facebook. That way, we wouldn’t break any rules because the contest exchange was happening off-site.

The prize would be a Dairy Queen Pumpkin Pie Blizzard cake, I was told. It was close to Thanksgiving, and to enter, you had to leave a comment on the blog post, sharing what you were thankful for. I asked several questions so I could write the blog post detailing the contest. In particular, I asked who was eligible to enter the contest.

“It’s open to everyone,” they told me.

I set it up according to their direction, writing, publishing, and sharing, settling in to await the silent humiliation. A week went by. No one commented on the blog post.

“We’re not getting any response,” the client called and informed me, angrily. “Do something.”

Thinking of how Elijah called down fire to burn up the sacrifice and altar and all things around it, I could definitely think of things I’d have liked to do. But within the bounds of the reality I had to work in, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. How do you grow traffic to a website and Facebook page if you’re not allowed to tell anyone—such as current customers—about it?

I had always made a point of never using my personal connections to boost client engagement because I actually like my friends and family, and it wouldn’t be right to do that. But the client kept pressuring me every day, and I could see the finish line, at which this client would go away and leave me alone. Desperate times, desperate measures.

I messaged my family and a couple of friends and asked them to please leave a comment on the website, sharing a link to the blog post. I figured others would participate after that.

A friend entered and left a comment.

No one else did.

The client called. “You people don’t know what you’re doing.”

It was true. I was totally questioning my career path at that point. But I bit my tongue. “It would help if I could share this contest more widely and if you’d let your customers who come into your business know that you have the contest.”

Nope. They would not.

I begged my family and friends. “Please help me on this one!” I said. “They’re driving me crazy!”

My sister, bless her, answered my call for help. She entered the contest, even though she lived several hundred miles away. But I assured her the contest rules didn’t forbid it (they didn’t), and since Dairy Queens are found pretty much everywhere in middle America, I saw no problem.

When it was all said and done, only my in-town friend and my out-of-town sister left a comment. Of course the client chose my sister as the winner.

At the time, my sister was working as a vet tech at a clinic in South Dakota that serviced both small and large animals. This shouldn’t have mattered, but the client’s wife, for some reason, decided to call my sister and congratulate her on winning the big prize, the Dairy Queen pumpkin pie blizzard ice cream cake.

Unfortunately, my sister was working cattle in a chute at the time, turning bulls into steers. The client’s wife heard more than she expected, I’m guessing: the frantic mooing of upset cattle, some metal clanging, a few swear words, yelling into the phone about no time for scams, a background comment about Rocky Mountain oysters, and then my sister hung up on the client.

“It was so noisy,” she later told me, while on a brief break. She’d seen the 701 area code and called me to ask about it. “I couldn’t hear anything, and I was getting slammed in the chute. I figured it was a scam because someone said they had a prize for me.”

My stomach sank. My sister is very friendly and very direct, and it can be very off-putting to the more genteel monied folk. “Well, that was my problem client you hung up on,” I said weakly, feeling as if my hair, brains, and future hopes and dreams were all wilting. “If you talk to them again, it’s not a scam. Just be polite and accept the gift certificate. Please.”

She went back to finish the cattle, calling the wife back after the last one was done and she was back inside in the office. “We were castrating bulls,” she explained, apologizing for hanging up. “I had my hands full. Sorry.”

The client’s wife left it at that, hanging up quickly after saying someone else would reach out. The husband eventually called my sister back, congratulating her on being the winner, but asked about her 605 area code.

She explained she lived in South Dakota.

“How will you claim the prize?” he asked, adding it was a gift certificate for a specific Dairy Queen in Bismarck.¹

My sister was surprised. “Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought anyone could enter. Just give the prize to someone else. No big deal.”

“No, you’re the winner,” the client insisted. “You have to take it.”

He would not relent. Brilliantly redeeming the situation, my sister offered up a solution. “I have a sister who lives in Bismarck. You know her. Give it to her instead.”

While on the phone, he attempted to look up my name in their customer records, assuming I was a client since he was supposed to know me. “We don’t find her in our records,” he said.

“Well, she works for some website design company or whatever there in town,” my sister cheerfully explained.

The phone got quiet. “Oh. I see.”

According to my sister, the tone of his voice shifted significantly. But she continued on, insisting that I was her sister and they could give her prize to me. I’m sure, in the eyes of the client, I had gamed the system and stolen a dessert from them.

The client called the office where I worked, but someone was on the line, so he left a voicemail. I wasn’t fully aware of what horror was taking place, but at some point, the whole staff realized the bosses were in their front glass-walled offices, dying of laughter. They went into the glass conference room, laughing some more. Finally, they opened the door.

“Julie, can you come in here?”

Oh please Jesus let this not be bad.

“There’s a voicemail we’d like you to hear.”

As it started playing, I really could feel the blood leaving my face for my feet. Each blood cell, trying to abandon me, and I could not blame them. There was the voice of this fussy client, with obvious displeasure, explaining he’d just talked to my sister, the “winner” of the prize of their contest I had helped them set up, and that they would get her gift certificate to me. But because my sister is who she is, she had asked the client, just as the phone conversation was finishing up, to relay a message to me.

“She wanted us to tell you that Chocolate Is King.” The client’s voice sounded strained.

I’m going to kill her. My bosses were bent over, laughing. Others in the office wandered in to see what was going on, listening to the voicemail over and over. While everyone had a laughter-inducing colon cleanse, I sneaked away to a back hallway and called my sister.

“What were you thinking?!” I asked. She knew the situation was already less than ideal.

“Pumpkin pie ice cream cake sounds gross,” she said. “I told him that I wanted you to pick a chocolate cake. But that guy insisted that wasn’t possible. He told me we didn’t get to choose what kind of ice cream cake. They already picked pumpkin. I told him that was too bad because chocolate was better. That’s when I said he should let you know that chocolate was king.”

She wasn’t wrong, to be fair, and I didn’t know how he could possibly specify what I could get with a gift certificate, but sometimes, when life, limb, and job are on the line, saying less is more.

“Next time, just focus on castrating bulls and leave the social interaction to me,” I snapped, a bold statement indeed for an introvert who actually doesn’t enjoy people.

I made my way back to the conference room, laughter still pouring out as the voicemail was replayed like a DJ at a club. Between gasps, my bosses told me that they’d never delete that voicemail because of the tone of his voice when he said “chocolate is king.”

“Chocolate is king.” — My sister, after a bullish day at the office.

The next day, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving—the day I had to drive more than four hours to get to the farm for family time—the client walked in with the gift certificate, heading directly to my desk.

All office chatter stopped, and everyone in the office was overly nonchalant, working so arduously while about shattering their eyes and ears trying to pay attention. One of my bosses followed him back to my desk, standing just off to the side and slightly behind. I stood up to take the certificate, my face no doubt red. I could see that the Dairy Queen staff had filled out that it was for a blizzard cake, but someone else had written that it could only be used for a pumpkin pie cake.

I reached out to take it. The client would not let go, gripping it tightly in his hand while he laid out some new rules. “You will take a picture of your sister with the cake. We’ll put yellow smiley faces over the faces of the people in the photo so we don’t have to deal with permission to publish the photo on our Facebook wall. It has to be a pumpkin pie cake, nothing else. We’ve dated this certificate so it has to be used soon.”

I stared at him. Photo? That wasn’t part of the contest at all. It was a Dairy Queen gift certificate, not odd marketable securities or bearer bonds from Nakatomi Plaza. Is this joker for real?

My feeling of embarrassment and mortification was quickly shifting to wanting to punch the guy in the throat. After kowtowing for months and having them work against my best efforts while still demanding results, and now I had to put on some kind of ice-cream dog and pony show?

It felt as if they had worked out a plan to defeat what perhaps they viewed as scheming to get a stupid $15 ice cream cake, as if that was what I had planned all along. Me, a former pastry chef, scheming to get an ice cream cake. I can only imagine the colorful conversation that had surrounded the planning of this certificate hand-off. At that moment, I was just so done with the nonsense.

“Fine,” I said, pulling the certificate from his hand, tempted to throw it in the garbage. The client turned and walked toward the door; my boss had a funny look on his face. The office grew quiet, eyes following the client out of the building.

“That was super weird,” my boss finally said, watching the client pull away from the curb. “I guess Awkward is King.”

The staff gathered around for an impromptu staff meeting. “What am I going to do?” I asked, explaining how there was no way I could make this happen for Thanksgiving. I was leaving for home in about an hour, didn’t have time to get an ice cream cake, and it would melt anyway. We brainstormed ideas.

Get the cake here in town, take a photo, photoshop it onto a family photo I’d take during Thanksgiving, and leave the cake at work in the freezer. Make a cake at home that kind of looks like an ice cream cake, and take a blurry photo. Or, get a cake box from Dairy Queen and have them hold the empty box for the photo, which was a winning idea until we realized they didn’t use boxes, but clear domed containers. The thing was, I didn’t have time to do any of it. I had to hit the road to get back to the farm before it got too late.

“I should just call them up and tell them to take the stupid certificate back,” I said finally, informing the rest of the team that I needed to get going, load up my car, and hit the road. “I’m not going to stress over some dumb pile of ice cream.”

I arrived at the farm, and with my family members, worked out a solution.

My older sister was coming in from Grand Forks on Thanksgiving Day. She’d pick up an ice cream cake, stick it in the trunk, and hope colder November weather and a shorter drive would keep the thing intact. It worked.

We had our Thanksgiving. We took a photo with the ice cream cake. My family spent most of Thanksgiving riffing off the stupidity of it all. And the next week at the office, I took the real gift certificate and got a CHOCOLATE frozen cake for the whole staff to enjoy, because the people at the Dairy Queen said I could choose whatever cake I wanted, regardless of what someone had written on it.

“I think it’s very appropriate,” one of my bosses said as we ate ice cream in the conference room, “that we’re eating the free cake of the client we fired as we wind down the year.”

The photo?

Well, it’s ridiculous. My family gave the client permission to share it without the smiley faces because that would just seem weird and awkward.

The client insisted on smiley faces, leaving us with less of a holiday photo and more as proof that the spiritual dimension has been breached and something walks among us.

Awkward is, indeed, king.

In the immediate weeks after, all I heard was how chocolate was king. One boss even made me a paper crown that said as much. And a decade later, once in a while, in both appropriate and inappropriate situations that have to do with dessert choices or strange human behavior, that phrase slips out at family events, at restaurants, and around the campfire.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Chocolate is king.

Never enter contests.

1. Like Burt Gummer in Tremors 2, I was denied this critical, need-to-know information. Not once did the client ever tell me that.