[unpixer]

Long ago, Ambrosia Software had a booth at one of the major tech conferences. Contests, trivia questions, t-shirts to win, the usual. Also, they were at the end of a major push to fix bugs in their games, and to celebrate they'd cooked up a bunch of food with bugs in it, and--somehow--convinced their marketing guy to eat the stuff in front of a bunch of attendees. (Maybe he lost a bet?)

And yes, I mean actual bugs. Insects. I'm talking roach pizza, worm casserole, that sort of thing.

Anyway, he shilly-shallied a bit, and finally agreed to do it, as long as he got to wash the stuff down with wine. (I'm assuming this part was staged as they'd brought a bottle.)

There was just one problem.

No corkscrew.

An appeal went out to the couple of dozen attendees: "Does anyone have a corkscrew?" Bunch of nerds at a tech conference, and nobody had a corkscrew...what are the chances?

Well, nobody except me, because I'm so ragingly dorky I never go anywhere without a Swiss Army knife of some sort.

I offered it up, the bottle was opened, there were cheers, and the guy standing next to me began lobbying the employees to give me a free t-shirt. Other attendees around him took up the chant, and the Ambrosia Software employees, to their credit, handed me a t-shirt when they returned my knife. It was a really nice one, black cotton with that big square maroon Ambrosia Software logo on the back, and the single word 'thaumaturgy' on the front in white lowercase monospaced font.

I wore that shirt for years afterward, until it somehow got lost in the shuffle of dropping laundry off at the laundromat. I'm still sad about its loss, because I was wearing that t-shirt the first time I talked to the woman who later became my wife. It was the shirt that initially caught her attention. We're still together to this day.

So thank you, Ambrosia Software. Thanks for the games...and everything else.

[TomAnthony]

This was before my time at Ambrosia, but I did work the booth at a few shows in different cities (San Fran, LA, Paris being memories). Your story definitely sounds like the sort of thing that would go down.

I also don't have any t-shirts anymore, but EV:Nova mouse mats are still used at my Mum's house!