October 11 , 2005

Trade Show no place for crooked fatsos

It’s still hard for me to believe that it’s been four years since the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Somerset County suddenly became the focal points of horror and uncertainty.

Remembering where I was that day is all the more vivid since I was responsible not only for my own whereabouts but those of several hundred of Blair County’s most ardent business enthusiasts as well. It was I, you see, who flip-flopped the Chamber’s Business Hall of Fame Dinner with the Business Trade Show, moving the former from September to October and the latter to the second Thursday of September. I remember telling someone from the Trade Show Committee, “You’re going to be amazed how much this change will mean to this event.”

Everyone was surely amazed. So amazed, in fact, that I had to shut-down the entire show four hours early. It seemed the prudent thing to do since the exhibitors were all huddled around a television, caring little about anything but the crisis at hand. And did I mention that the site of this trade show was the Jaffa Mosque? There were probably better places to be under the circumstances than a mosque.

Four years later I can tell you with some degree of certainty that our Business Trade Show has enjoyed a revival. We have created a theme for each event and moved it to the Blair County Convention Center. Exhibitors and attendees seem satisfied that it meets their collective goals. Attendance and participation are climbing.

For hypochondriacs and paranoids like myself, however, threats still linger. Not in terms of firestorms in the sky. Those are far too real. I’m talking about the trade show exhibitors whose means of product promotion include games of skill, medical testing and special apparatus. They are meant to be fun and thought-provoking and for the majority of rational people they hit the mark. For the rest of us, the thoughts that they provoke feed nicely into our damaged psyches.

Let me give you an example. As Executive Director of The Chamber, I feel a sense of obligation to involve myself in the quality control piece of all of our programs and events. At the Business Trade Show that means walking around, aisle to aisle, to make sure that everyone is having a good time. Kind of like Zeppo the Clown without the heavy make-up.

Rather than simply walking-by the booths with a wave and a kind word, I often stop to gain a better perspective of the clever ways that businesses chase market share. At the 2005 show, it was incredible the amount of imagination on display.

At my first two stops, I threw a football through a hoop and missed a five-foot putt three consecutive times. I’m comfortable with my declining athletic skills, particularly those involving golf, so my self-esteem remained mostly intact.

At my next stop, I was handed a small mechanical devise and told to wear it around my neck for an hour. It turned out to be an air purifier which would encircle my head with clean air while everyone around me was dying a slow death from all the toxic particles blowing everywhere. The consolation of outliving everyone else by a full sixty minutes wasn’t enough to offset the realization that once I relinquished the device to its owner, I was back in particle-hell all over again.

To offset this new-found stress, I stopped at a chiropractor’s booth and got a chair massage which unfortunately lasted only a few, wonderful minutes. I was almost as sorry to leave that chair as I was to lose clean air. As a bonus, the chiropractor did a skeletal exam where he determined that I was, in his words, “crooked.” It seems that my left hip and my left shoulder are higher than my right hip and right shoulder. “You need to go see your chiropractor,” he told me. It might be my imagination but he seemed rather relieved that he wasn’t my chiropractor.

Now, feeling like Quasimodo and surrounded by foul air, I stumbled off to an exhibit where they measuring body-fat. I liked my chances with this one. I work-out on a regular basis and most people regard me as fairly slender. How much body fat, really, could I possibly have?

Too much, as it turns out. According to the technician administering the test, I need to increase my workouts if I expect to live a healthy life. Then she showed me what ten pounds of body fat looks like. I didn’t need to see that, even though it was pretty much the way I had pictured it.

I was proud of what I did then. I thanked the lady for her insight and headed straight for the Gardners Candies booth. It hit me just then that if I was fat and crooked, it mattered little if I was destined for suffocation anyway.

Ah, the things you can learn at a trade show.

Past Chamber Notes

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