Ctrl Freak

Yet another trade show shirt from my mom. These all come up pretty randomly so I hope I'm getting the bulk of these out of the way sooner rather than later haha.
She picked this up from the Motorola booth at one of the trade shows/educational conferences she attended.
You don't get much cheaper than a shirt like this. The only thing cheaper would be if it was a white shirt. It's white ink in a really small printing area; they may have sprung for extra colors to do the shading on the key. Way to go Motorola, keepin' the costs down. At least they pulled out a medium, so it's not a total loss.
On the front is a "Ctrl" key and the word "freak," a nice -trite- little graphic for a graphic tee. A design that is just interesting enough to not let you throw this freebie away. On the back is the advertising, "Motorola wireless LAN enterprise," basically the new product they were pitching at the time. Which, by now, has got to be crazy out of date.
http://www.motorola.com/Business/US-EN/Business+Product+and+Services/Wireless+LAN
Even though this shirt is super low quality I still wear it for three reasons. 1) It's got some geek/nerd cred. I'm not a control freak as it were, maybe a closet perfectionist, but that's not the point. I usually go with the flow but keyboard keys on a shirt in any capacity is a must. 2) It was a gift/it was free so why not? If it gets spilled on, thrashed or lost it's really no biggie. 3) It is limited edition. This shirt can only be obtained from a Motorola representative at one of their booths, during this campaign. If nothing else I will probably never meet someone else with this same shirt.

All of these free shirts kind of blend together. My mom and I go to a lot of these kinds of expos, conferences and conventions. The freebies pile up pretty quick and we do what we can to keep up. I mean the bags are re-purposed for luggage sometimes and I think I could highlight an entire encyclopedia in every color of the rainbow with the pens and markers and highlighters we've gotten. The shirts are another common commodity, though as the economy fell they were harder to come by; filling out surveys and grabbing them out of a crowd became commonplace. Some sponsors take their giveaways very seriously, numbered items, variants or signings which command huge lines at bigger cons. At this point picking out and acquiring choice swag can be an art. Companies are growing wise to these consumer patterns and are changing their strategies: having different items given on different days or not even announcing time and place; some only provide it to media professionals. Which really drives me bats. It can become very tiresome and one must be ever vigilant to secure the primo merch.