I Blew My Chance at Becoming a QDOBA Brand Ambassador — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

One of QDOBA’s many delicious cheese-crusted options

I don’t get many offers these days. The ones that I do get tend to be both perverse and exceedingly easy to reject. For example, every month or so I get an email from a freelancer offering to write a blog post for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place about how to look for a nursing home for an elderly parent or plan for retirement.

It’s pretty obvious that the hopeful, deluded souls who send me invariably off-brand pitches are not familiar with my website. If they were they would understand that, with the exception of the Travolta/Cage episode announcements that Clint pens, the site is written entirely by me. They would also realize that we talk about weird movies, creepy celebrities and Garfield here, not end of life planning.

I did recently get a different kind of offer that tickled me pink so I figured I would share it with you.

It was from the good people at QDOBA Mexican Eats. What is QDOBA Mexican EATS, you ask? According to its website, “QDOBA Mexican Eats is a chain of fast-casual restaurants in the United States and Canada serving Customizable Burritos, Crave-Worthy Tacos, and Creamy 3-Cheese Queso. QDOBA is all about flavor. The flavor of the food, the flavor of the restaurants, and, most importantly, the flavor of the people.”

QDOBA’s new menu items drop a Q bomb-of flavor for your taste buds!

Who has more flavor than a white straight middle aged man? Now if this was Garfield Eats reaching out to me I would say yes in a heartbeat. Sadly, Garfield Eats now exists only as a beautiful memory in the minds and fuzzy memories of true believers.

QDBOA Mexican Eats, sadly, has nothing to do with Garfield but instead offers Customizable Burritos, Crave-Worthy Tacos, and Creamy 3-Cheese Queso to chain restaurant buffs.

A brand manager stumbled across my profile and figured I would be the perfect person to promote QDOBA’s Customizable Burritos, Crave-Worthy Tacos, and Creamy 3-Cheese Queso.

So they’ve asked me to take a series of photographs of myself lustily enjoying QDOBA’s delicious Customizable Burritos, Crave-Worthy Tacos, and Creamy 3-Cheese Queso and then post them to Instagram.

I only post poorly colored-in images from my “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book on Instagram so it’s understandable that they’d want to exploit my incredible popularity and relevance.

The website angrily demanded that when we post images of ourselves orgasmically devouring QDOBA’s delicious Customizable Burritos, Crave-Worthy Tacos, and Creamy 3-Cheese Queso and that we use the hashtags #QDOBAMexicanEats #QDOBAPartner or #QdOBACheeseCrustedQuesadillas.

Funnily enough, I have been using the hashtag #QdOBACheeseCrustedQuesadillas for months now and never thought I could get something out of it.

It’s not enough to simply take a picture of a nasty-looking burrito captioned #barf. That’s the OPPOSITE of what these folks want me to do. In order to qualify, applicants should be interacting joyfully with the food.

The website specifies that it needs “1-5 still images or video AND 1-2 story frames of you enjoying your QDOBA Cheese Crusted Quesadillas (ideally, QDOBA bag, drink cup, and menu items in the images or taking a bite).”

I suspect that if you were to stick your erect penis inside a Customizable Burrito or Crave-Worthy Taco, using Creamy 3-Cheese Queso as a crude and ineffective lubricant, then videotaped yourself grinding away until you experience the most explosive orgasm of your life and bust a monster nut all over the wall of QDOBA, absolutely drenching it in human ejaculate in the process, you would not qualify for the program even if you are technically REALLY interacting with QDOBA’s Customizable Burritos, Crave-Worthy Taco and Creamy 3-Cheese Queso. They don’t come right out and say it but if you read between the lines they clearly want food to be eaten rather than fucked. It’s an optics thing I suppose.

Fist-fighting a burrito, using a taco to wipe your ass following an explosive bowel movement or having an animated argument with a taco you start kicking in anger similarly won’t fit the campaign because they clearly only want POSITIVE interactions with QDOBA food, not a bleak video of you unsuccessfully staging an intervention for a cocaine-addicted steak burrito.

What do you get in exchange for compromising your ethics and integrity and selling your soul? A thirty five dollar gift code to assist you in your sure-to-go-viral post of yourself with QDOBA’s Customizable Burritos, Crave-Worthy Taco and Creamy 3-Cheese Queso.

That is some straight up bullshit. There’s no way I’m doing that for a penny less than forty dollars.

In a funny twist, even if I DID want to sell my soul for the price of two meals at a modestly priced Mexican chain eatery I wouldn’t be able to, since the offer is only open to people who live in Denver, CO, Grand Rapids, MI or Omaha, NE and I live in Alpharetta, Georgia.

It would be a different story if it were, say, Arby’s, approaching me about being a brand ambassador. I would happily get their logo tattooed on my ass for a free Double Beef and Cheddar but I adamantly refuse to do anything to get out the word about QDOBA’s irresistible line of Customizable Burritos, Crave-Worthy Tacos and Creamy 3-Cheese Queso.

I have entirely too much integrity for that kind of bullshit.

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