All about the tchotchke
09:09 on Tuesday, March 26, 2002 • 2 responses
One of my best friends was in town last week attending the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. It’s been my experience that conferences (of the computer variety) are less about people and more about accumulating things.
There are, of course, the obvious chotchkas: pens, buttons, odd machine-made foldable paper sculptures…basically anything large enough to print a logo on but small enough to let you know that the company was too cheap to want to give away the good shit. Pens I understand. Buttons—not so much. The only people I know who wear buttons are TGI Friday’s employees. I feel sorry for them. Not so much because they work at TGI Fridays, but because they have to wear those buttons. Or at least they did the last time I went there, which was a good 4 years ago. Maybe they’ve moved past buttons. Maybe employees are now required to tattoo 45 different versions of “Smile, it’s Friday!” on their necks.
The next “grade” of conference chotchka is the cloth item. These aren’t always free, and if they are, they’re only free for a day or they’re given away by “hourly drawing.” I love those hourly drawings—some guy with a microphone lists off a name and no one responds, so they announce that the winner will be informed by email, but there are drawings every hour on the hour. That’s not a good policy—telling people at your booth that they’re losers but they should come back in an hour to realize that sixty minutes later, they’re still losers. Anyway, the cloth chotchka usually takes the form of tote bags, hats, and t-shirts, but I’ve seen things like towels given away. That’s right, towels. Because XYZ, Inc. apparently wants you to rub their logo all over your ass when you get out of the shower. As for hats, t-shirts, and totebags, well, let’s just say that they’re all useful, but if you wear the neon green hat from booth #423, the t-shirt with some horrid sexual use of geek terminology such as “I’ve got a big phong,” and carry the black canvas totebag filled with pens, buttons, odd machine-made foldable paper sculptures, and towels—you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Then there’s the product literature. How the hell does this stuff find its way into your bag? Conferences usually give you a plastic bag when you pick up your badge—I’ve noticed that these bags are getting bigger and bigger. Some of them now have reinforced handles. I’m sure the beefier handle designs were mandated by the liability clauses in these conventions’ insurance policies—just think of the potential energy stored up in one of those bags when full. The funny thing about the conference literature you accumulate is this—95% of it is stuff that you get home, look at, and think, “why the hell did I pick this up?” Why? Because you had a bag in your hands. A bag with reinforced handles. Somehow, when you’re in that conference “zone”, putting all that literature-accumulation engineering to waste seems a huge travesty, despite the fact that if you are interested, you’ll probably see the same info on their website when you get home.
Lastly, and most importantly, are the conference chotchkas that defy description. This stuff is so wierd that only SoBigThatWeCanAffordToGiveYouCoolShitForFree, Inc. hands it out. These items have a limited lifespan—they’re usually something you can’t stop fidgeting with, so they break or find their way to the trash when you realize that figuring out the puzzle or forcing the chotcha to take a certain shape or make a certain noise is slowly taking over your entire life. If they don’t break or get thrown away, they get put on your desk, where your coworkers or friends can pick them up and say, “hey, where’d you get this?” Then they get addicted and come bother you at your desk more often.
So my very good friend left me one of these very odd chotchkas as what I assume he thought was a “token of appreciation” for letting him stay here and borrow my car all last week. And this odd chotchka is, in fact, taking over my entire life. I can’t describe it—it’s a small-squishy-kinda-fascinating-in-an-irresistably-grotesque-way thing [ 336KB, requires Quicktime ].