Swag
I was going to put this in QOTW suggestions but it's far too boring. I went to an Edexcel conference last week and was given a free fountain pen, which I was rather chuffed at. The next day I show it off to my colleague who responds by showing me the huge, leatherbound filofax with calculator, notebook AND fountain pen she'd gotten last year.

What's the best swag you've ever gotten on a training day/conference thing?
(GONEism, Mon 1 Dec 2008, 15:34, 3 replies, latest was 16 years ago)

I have a biro
with "Gas Safe" printed on the clip.

I got it free from a gas safety training course - surprise, surprise - so I had to endure two hours or so of someone telling why I shouldn't drink liquid nitrogen, but I did get a free pen out of it.

And it's quite ironic that I can walk around with a "Gas Safe" motif on my shirt pocket, as I think the Ringwood Bitter might have been nearing the end of the barrel last night, so "Gas Safe" is the one thing I'm not.

Ah, fart jokes. It's been a long day.
(LongJohnBaldry, Mon 1 Dec 2008, 15:46, Reply)

at one conference
I was forced to attend, all we had were little notebooks and a cheap biro. As we left, we all got handed a little envelope. Half the staff binned the thing without opening it. I'm too nosy to do that, so I opened the envelope ... and found £25 worth of shopping vouchers. Never seen so many people scrambling to rake bins in my life. Talk about seagulls at a landfill site ....
(TheWeeWitch hasn't been here much recently .., Mon 1 Dec 2008, 17:46, Reply)

Not really a conference thing
but my brother ran the London marathon a few years ago and I went along with him to the docklands to register and so on. There we stumbled on stall upon stall of people more than happy to give (both of us) carrier bags full of sports drinks, sports socks, notebooks, calculators, post it's, pens...The Nike stand were giving away a pair of trainers every half hour as part of a raffle, so we stayed for 3 hours blagging more stuff and I won a pair of trainers. Never wore them, but they were quite pretty.
( fuck shit up the best you never had, Mon 1 Dec 2008, 20:42, Reply)