FalconStor Blows Segway Promo, Gets T-shirts Tossed Back By Angry Crowd

You know your promotion has gone all wrong when everybody throws your T-shirts back in your face.

At least, FalconStor knows, as shown in this video.

The storage virtualization vendor gave away hundreds of brightly colored T-shirts to solution providers and end users who visited its booth at the VMworld conference in September, and told everyone to be back at a certain time with their shirts so that one of them would win a brand new Segway.

When the time came, the area around the booth was a sea of hopeful Segway owner wannabees wearing their orange FalconStor T-shirts, with few exceptions.

One of those exceptions won the Segway. When his name was drawn, he pulled out his orange FalconStor T-shirt from his bag.

FalconStor folks said he won, because the rules of the drawing said the winner had to have the T-shirt. Nothing in the rules said the winner had to wear the T-shirt.

Well, you can imagine that all those orange T-shirt-wearing folks crowded around the booth were not happy. In fact, it was a mini-riot as a large part of the crowd moaned, yelled and ripped off their T-shirts and flung them in the face of the FalconStor personnel.

Fortunately, no one was injured by a flying T-shirt.

And fortunately for all of us, someone had what appears to be a tiny video camera or cell phone camera, and was able to record the riot.

And, if any of you need a slightly used orange T-shirt, I know where you might be able to get a few free of charge. . . .