…thousands witness the exciting experience
THIRTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD cosmetologist Dionne Hercules, of 122 Parade Street, Kingston, last night won for herself a brand new house, compliments of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company Limited.

She won as part of the GT&T Text, Talk Top Up promotion that has been running for several months now, and which gave customers a chance to win the house by accumulating points every time they text, talked and topped up their phones.
Dionne was among ten persons whose numbers were randomly selected on the opening night of GuyExpo on Thursday last to vie for the keys to the house.
Last evening, under the eyes of more than a thousand persons who gathered at the main stage area of the Sophia Exhibition Site Sophia, the ten contenders were required to take part in several legs of the promotion before the final two were selected for the draw for the house.
The first part of the competition saw the phone company putting the contestants through a ‘Price Is Right-like” show where they were required to guess the actual retail prices of items that were displayed by some GT&T models.
These items included soap, cooking oil, a BlackBerry and a laptop. That leg of the promotion saw the five of the contestants being shortlisted to take part in the second round of the promotion. They were, Dionne Hercules, Kathleen Moore, Yonette Chase Murray, Shawn Xavier and Latchmi Braithwaite.
The five short listed persons were then tasked with selecting one of five nicely decorated boxes bearing the GT&T logo. In these boxes were two papers that were labelled house keys while the other three boxes contained labels of phones, one of them being a BlackBerry.
After the first house label was pulled by Latchmi Braithwaite, the crowd and the other contestants thought that it was the end of the road for the competition and the house draw, but they were very much wrong.
Just when the other contestants began to show signs of frustration, the MC then began asking the other contestants if they thought that it was the only box with a key label. Suspecting that there was hope, the faces of the other contestants lit up with smiles and confidence was renewed.
As the selection continued, the end result revealed that the final two contestants who were going to battle it out for the house were Latchmi Braithwaite and Dionne Hercules. The remaining three contestants were given the prizes that they initially pulled, while the other five persons who were not among the short listed five received the ‘Value Pack” from GT&T.
The final two contestants for the house were then placed in a transparent plastic house where they were required to fill an apron with bills that flew all over the box propelled by a wind machine. The two were each given 30 seconds to complete that task and the person with the most bills at the end of the 30 seconds was declared the winner.
Latchmi secured for herself 64 thousand points with her bills, while Dionne secured 87 thousand points with her bills.
The crowd expressed their satisfaction with the choice of GT&T in coming up with the final winner and that was evident from the enthusiastic response the crowd gave when the various stages of competition were revealed and the winners announced. The phone company conducted all of its GuyExpo competitions with an independent auditor present.
Meanwhile on Saturday night, GT&T continued its GuyExpo giveaways and rewarded a young lady with one of the latest phones in the BlackBerry line.
She, like previous winners of the same model of phone, was required to blow, tie and sit on four balloons; and whoever completed the task first was announced the winner.