komodo
Site Admin
Joined: 16 May 2006
Posts: 105
Fri Jun 23, 2006 3:26 am |
 Post subject: Free Prizes and Giveaways Galore |
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All right, so I was at a conference almost all day today presented by Eastern Data (EDI). Standard technology conference, a few speakers from the deep-pockets, and a big room full of booths with crowds of people everywhere.
Microsoft had a pretty big presence, bringing their cross-country tour showbus, AMD and Intel spent some money there, and there were booths from every company from Viewsonic to Logitech to Tyan to Crucial to Benq to Asus to Koolance, etc.
Anyway, enough background, story time. I went with a business partner of mine, Brian. We showed up a bit late, registered at the front desk, got our name badges, bags for swag, and a few freebies to start it off (t-shirts and such). They also gave us a raffle ticket for some prizes given out after each presenter and some plastic poker chips for vegas-style tables set up around the convention. We walked into the first speech presentation and listed to AMD ramble on for a while, and then they called the first raffle prize. Brian won it! It was a brand new, high-end AMD processor. He was all happy, because there was about 1,000 people in that room, and he was the lucky one. Then someone else rambled on, and they announced another prize, a very nice Microsoft laptop carrying case… and I won! Now, people all around us saw me and Brian talking and making wise-cracks at the speakers, so they knew we were together… so it felt really strange getting up and claiming the prize after Brian had just won. I was afraid a mutiny was about to hit from all the glares, haha. Anyway, we then went to walk around with the vendors and see all the booths. After we got bored and couldn’t carry any more free tshirts, pens, brochures, or stress balls, we went to the blackjack tables scattered around the room. We used the couple of plastic chips they gave us earlier, and Brian quickly lost all his… however I didn’t. I started winning, and winning… I went all in a few times, and kept winning. Before I knew it, I had a few tens of thousands of dollars in play money. Now we were feeling incredible about that, so I decided to cash out while I was still ahead, and we took our ticket to the prize table. We got there and realized it was $100 play money for every single credit, and the prizes got pretty expensive fast. I thought I might be able to at least get a coffee mug or something small. Well the lady we got was very confused and hyper-active, and obviously couldn’t do math, because I ended up leaving with thousands of credits worth of prizes, haha! I got a nice Intel jacket, a few nice polo shirts (Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Cisco, and Oracle), a few tshirts, some mouse pads, a few cool/strange looking coffee mugs, and another REALLY nice laptop carrying case.
So there I am, walking out of the convention with 4 bags of free stuff, so heavy I can barely carry it…. probably worth a good five hundred dollars in total. It was quite a day. 
Trackback to my blog: http://www.harrymaugans.com/2006/06/17/free-prizes-and-giveaways-galore/ |
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