There’s a flip side to winning prizes every other day you know? Really, there is! It begins when you get home to find a little card on the floor saying “You Were Out. Packet is Too Big for your Letterbox.”

As I work during the day I’m always out during the week when the postman arrives so anything that doesn’t fit or needs signing for gets taken away again.

That’s such a tease.

Only last week when in San Francisco on a trip I won from LinkShare. (No letter box is big enough for that prize.) I received a call saying I had a parcel waiting for delivery. It was with DHL and as it’s walkable distance from my home I went to collect the large box with my passport on my return.

I wasn’t expecting anything, so was curious. My personalised “The Apprentice” calendar from Getting Personal had already arrived. (Notes to merchants: That was sent to my works address) as had my free pants from Dead Good Undies.

So when I saw that the large box was from Sweden I was confused. It had “spare parts” on the label and that was making me even more curious. So I ripped the box open before I even got home.

Inside was a pack of cards and an 8GB Schwartz iPod Nano from PokerRoom. Now everything fell into place. They sent me an email during December saying that if I revisited them and played poker again with them via mobile, I’d be entered into a draw for every mobile real-money hand I’d played.

I’ve been lucky with these prize draws of late!

Now another card has arrived from Royal Mail and I don’t know what the contents are. I’m speculating that it can only be one of two gifts.

Either chocolate from hotel chocolat who just recently paid me £100 cash bonus for good Christmas sales. No, it won’t be them, as I was promoting an offer I shouldn’t have.

Or it could be another personalised calendar from Getting Personal, this time for Valentine’s. Well, someone has to love me.

I can’t wait any longer, so I’m going to walk from my office to the Royal Mail Delivery Office in Leeds to find out.

And this is why winning incentives gets dangerous.

Google maps tells me I have to walk across two roads, a railway track, a canal and the River Aire before another main road, the Inner Ring Road, some private property and back across the River Aire.

Collecting merchant and network incentives is a dangerous game but someone’s got to do it.