Best Pen
Winner: Sanders, for their black, gold-trimmed metal pens.
Runner Up: Rational, for their puzzle pens.
Best Pencil
Winner: IBM, for their clear and blue rear-click pencils.
Runner Up: IBM, for their white and black side-click pencils. No matter how you get your clicks, IBM has you covered.
Best Highlighter
Winner: Alphatech, for their two-color triangular erasable highlighters, combining the design of the runners up in 1997 and 1998 with the erasability of last year's winner and this year's runner up.
Runner Up: Texas Instruments, for their yellow erasable highlighters, which won in this category last year.
Best Key Chain
Winner: Watson Wyatt Worldwide, for their carabiner/LED light combos.
Runners Up: BASF, for their thermometer key chains and Stanley, for their tape measure key chains.
Best Note Pad
Winner: C&M, for their note sheet cube.
Runner Up: Stratus, for their large white sticky note pads.
Best Magnet
Winners: Logistics.com and Mercury Computer Systems, for their computer word magnets.
Runners Up: GE, Foxboro, and CDM, for their mood selector magnets, which Raytheon has had in previous years.
Best Stress Ball
Winner: Event Zero, for their small, heavy, gel-type stress balls.
Runner Up: Primix, for their slightly different gel stress balls.
Best Flying Object
Winners: Rational, Cisco, and General Dynamics, for their lightweight discs. Rational had these at the last summer job fair, and Cisco had theirs in five colors.
Runner Up: Factset, for their foam planes.
Best Toy
Winner: Breakaway, Cadence, Gemstar, Teradyne, and Viant for their bouncing balls that light up when bounced.
Runner Up: SilverStream, for its silly putty.
Best Electrical Device
Winner: Raytheon, for their electric fans.
Runner Up: StorageNetworks, for their large flashlights with removable magnetic clips.
Best Beverage Container
Winner: Agilent, for their large plastic mugs.
Runner Up: Schlumberger, for their sports bottles.
Best Candy
Winner: Stratus, for their home made chocolate bars.
Runner Up: Phoenix Technologies, for their Nestle Crunch bars, Hershey's chocolate bars, and Reese's peanut butter cups.
Most Useful
Winner: EMC, for their CD cases.
Runner Up: The Hartford, for their collapsible coolers.
Most Useless
Winner: Natural Microsystems, for their plastic stick figure things.
Runner Up: GE, for their folding cubes that feature the cast of Friends for no apparent reason.
Strangest Looking
Winner: Verizon, for their black and white padded clip things that look like bugs.
Runner Up: APC, for their alligator clips anchored in clear blocks.
Most Annoying
Winner: Texas Instruments, for their plastic clapper noisemakers.
Most Original
Winner: Raytheon, for their electric fans.
Runner Up: NAV AIR, for their beach balls.
Honorable Mentions
Allegro, for their coasters. Impress your parents with coasters under every can of beer, er, I mean soda, yeah, soda...
TASC, for their golf ball with five colored tees.
Mitre, for their 6" rulers with built-in puzzles.
SeaChange, for their playing cards.
Person it was strangest to see as a company representative
Winner: M/A-COM: Greg Snoddy. No longer on the WPI staff, he knew enough to make sure I wasn't ignored at the M/A-COM table.
Runner Up: Texas Instruments: Wes Blackstone. After so many years as a WPI student, he finally left and got a job, although he didn't get a shirt to match the other TI representatives.
Tech News Editors' Choice Award
Winner: Clairol, for their bottles of Herbal Essences shampoo.
Most Colorful Assortment
Winner: Schlumberger - black sports bottles, blue bandannas, six-color yo-yos, and six-color puzzle balls made for a colorful table.
Runner Up: General Dynamics - different colored pens, three-color highlighters, blue and purple bendy things, and blue discs.
Best Overall Assortment
Winner: Stratus - pens, chocolate bars, prepaid calling cards, note pads, sunglasses, eyeglass cords, plastic bags - they had a nice variety.
Least Visible
Winner: Microsoft. I don't try to give Microsoft the booby prize every year, they earn it. I didn't actually see Microsoft's booth, but those who did reported that it was easy to miss.