Hey, guess what? My welts are gone and I don’t feel weird anymore. And, best of all, my phone isn’t ringing as much today as it was yesterday (a bold claim to make at 9:23 a.m., I know).

One bad thing about the start of the semester is that our graduate assistants go back to part time (they often work full-time over breaks). The first week of classes is still a busy time, yet we suddenly have fewer employee hours to work with. Yikes. Yesterday I turned off my phone to try to work on conference planning. The problem is, my phone has a little light that flashes when it’s ringing, even when I have the ringer turned off. I made the stupid mistake of answering once when nobody else could take it, and that phonecall created a situation that made me need to call product support, and product support said they’d call back. So from that point on, I had to answer the phone every time it rang because maybe it would be product support.

It never was. The product support guy emailed.

Regardless, I got a fair amount done. I have to decide what conference schwag to give away. If you were attending this conference, which of the following would you most like to get? Naturally, all of the below will be emblazoned with the ICON logo and possibly the support line phone number. Not my phone number.

• Carabiner highlighter (aka a highlighter with a metal clippy thing that you can attach to a belt loop or a backpack or whatever)
• Insulated lunch bag
• Magnet (plastic with logo)
• Business card magnet (rectangular with a business card on it)
• Stainless steel mug
• Little tins with tiny mints
• Post-it notes

I think the stainless steel mugs and little tins of mints are the coolest, though unfortunately they’re expensive. But if I were attending the conference, I might rather get one cool thing than a bunch of little crap. What about you?