Free For All

Anyone who saw me at the OCS Career Forum last month could instantly tell I wasn't really interested in a job. For one thing, I was wearing jeans, a sweater and my huge L.L. Bean backpack--an ensemble which didn't exactly scream "Hire Me!" And I wasn't exactly schmoozing the recruiters, either. For example:

Me: "Could you tell me what constitutes a successful application for a summer internship with your firm?"

Sharply-Dressed Recruiter: "Well, we look for strong quantitative skills and a high GPA..."

Me: "Can I have one of those pens?"

Let's face it. The Career Forum is great if you want, for some unknown reason, to spend your life in investment banking or consulting. But it's also the place to pick up some pretty cool free stuff. The whole event is Halloween for College students.

I spent the afternoon wandering around with my OCS plastic bag--picking up all the pens, coffee cups, mugs, slinkies, highlighters, squishie balls and other fun things the companies were passing out. Disney's Mickey Mouse pencils definitely ranked in the top five free recruiting gifts, but the prize went to CapitalOne, some sort of financial outfit. Their recruiters baked homemade chocolate chip cookies. In a world of blue pinstripe, that's originality for you.

I'll admit it: I'm a free-stuff junkie. I will go out of my way to get something for free even if I don't really want it. This disturbing trait has manifested itself throughout my life.

As a child, I always thought the favors were the best part of birthday parties. In high school, I seriously considered getting a credit card at one of the cheesier stores in my local mall just because they offered a free mesh bag to all credit card holders. I withstood the urge to charge, but I did pick up a free Sprint pen at a recent Aerosmith concert--and danced holding it all night. The Snapple guy in the street is my favorite sight as I walk through the Square.

Free t-shirts present their own problem: too little drawer space. Since September, I've collected the standard Radcliffe registration shirt, a nifty one with a picture of Johnston Gate from The Coop and a Crimson freebie honoring last year's Commencement. Multiply that by five semesters at Harvard and you come up with far too many t-shirts for someone who doesn't wear them except for sleeping and working out.

Mass events (similar to the Career Forum) often overflow with free stuff for the taking. At the Head of the Charles this year, I gleaned a Motorola megaphone for which I have no use whatsoever. I also picked up a bottle of bubble solution from Princeton Review and a completely useless keychain lanyard from Tag Heuer, the watch company.

Where do these items go? What does one do with a megaphone, anyway? Living in a tiny Adams House single, I tend to stack items on my dresser, leaving it crowded with silly plastic toys. My mug collection grew so large last year my roommates made me ship two boxes of mugs home to my parents.

Not all free stuff clutters up your room, however. Free food samples always catch my eye. My first stop in a grocery store is the bread counter, where they're likely to be giving out morsels of cheddar cheese dill bread or sesame semolina. Stores known to provide free samples are more likely to get my business. At Fresh Fields, a yuppie-style grocery store in Washington owned by Boston's Bread and Circus chain, the savvy customer can eat practically an entire lunch just by grazing from the sample baskets. Tacky? I guess so. Yummy? You bet.

And it didn't help that I spent a summer interning at Bloomberg Business News, a company known for its free food. In an effort to keep employees in the office all day without any productivity-busting lunch breaks, Bloomberg provides a fully-stocked kitchen in each office. The kitchen in the Washington office, featured every type of candy known to man, including frighteningly addictive Swedish Fish. Every day, I helped myself to five or six free Diet Cokes, a free breakfast bagel and an apple or two.

Free stuff is even more prevalent in the working world than at college. I left my job at The Wall Street Journal at the end of this summer with a whole bag of neat promotional items, which my editor had wrangled out of the advertising sales staff I gave my dad the magnetic paperweight with sculptable metal pieces in the shape of world currency, including yen and deutsche marks, but I kept the CD case for myself.

I think I picked up the free-stuff habit from my childhood in a medical family. Pharmaceutical companies were constantly giving my dad, a pulmonologist, free samples and promotional gifts. As a consequence, to this day I have trouble paying for drugs; I forget to buy Sudafed, thinking we have lots at home. Too bad home is back in DC. For what it would cost to mail the free Sudafed samples from my parents' closet, I've learned to utilize the CVS in the Square.

But this abundance of free stuff around the house left a deep impression on my young mind. We never bought notepads; our refrigerator magnets were shaped like Tylenol capsules. I remember my dad had a fascinating white plastic cube with various tiny useful items--pencil sharpener, scissors, exacto-knife--embedded in the sides. I could play with the cube for hours, trying to figure out how every piece fit. The love of free stuff gradually became ingrained in my very being.

And the Claritin notepads aren't the half of it. Free stuff is an integral part of my family's underlying structure. Our vacations are entirely built around frequent-flyer miles; all four of us, including my 17-year-old sister, have registered frequent flyer numbers for every airline on which we've ever flown.

Somewhere in the Delta Airlines computer system sits an account containing some 500 mile points from a round-trip Delta Shuttle ticket to New York City. Other than that one trip, I've never flown Delta and don't plan to--but if I did, I've got my frequent-flyer card in my wallet. When friends tell me they don't belong to any frequent-flyer programs, I'm amazed. Why pay for tickets when you don't have to?

When we've amassed enough frequent flyer miles to get somewhere really exciting--this year we're going to Miami Beach--we go. And to make sure we're squeezing all the frequent flyer miles we can out of our lives, we all have United Airlines Visa cards. When my parents call me at school and then pay for the phone bill with their frequent-flyer card, we're all that much closer to a vacation.

I'm fairly certain it's hopeless. I've refrained from getting a Student Advantage card, but I can't stop myself from taking a bottle of Sunny Delight from a promotion booth on the street even though I have no desire to drink it. But at least all those Career Forum pens come in handy for class.FM