Day 3 - The first day of the show

I get in nice and early because, as usual, I'm expecting to find the
network lying in a smoking ruin at the bottom of a dark pit in the middle
of the NOC. Some people might say that I was being overly paranoid, but
I still can't believe that is has all gone so smoothly. Unfortunately my
stress is unwarranted and we are still forwarding packets to the outside
world. So we kick back, wait for the show to open and monitor the radio
for any trouble.

This is fortunate because I happen to overhear Show Management trying
to deal with a 'situation' and still be polite about it over the airwaves.

"...Um there seems to be someone at the front entrance who
is preaching to the attendees"

"Could you repeat that ?"

"Well, apparently there is a Guru at the front, you should
probably call security, they are, well, I'm not sure exactly, but
the report is that they are preaching or something..."

I'm sure what they really wanted to say was "There is a religious nutter
out here wearing robes and a dead animal performing all manner of street
theater and you had better get the rubber van before he hurts someone".

James decided that this was probably as good a reason as any to try
and gather some photo documentation of the days proceedings (Actually ,
i think what he really said was "Photos of booth babes", but we'll give
him his moment of denial) and ran off into the throng.

Moment of irony would have to be that the one booth that was drawing the
largest crowd, was asked to stop what they were doing by show management
because their Penthouse Pet booth babes were not allowed to handout
flyers on the show floor. There were many disappointed geeks when that
news got around.

The day thus became a quiet one. We watched the network, watched the
floor, waited for the show to close and crashed the Worldcom shmooze
and booze hour. People were met, cards were exchanged, hands were shaken
and then we realised that Extreme were going to buy us all dinner so a
restaurant booking was quickly made.

This was when things turned ugly. I'm not sure who was captain of the
SS Extreme that evening, but I'm do recall all the bills went to some
guy called BJ. He had the good taste to invite us all to the Sydney W
hotel for dinner and more drinking but beyond that it was all a bit of
a blur. The trouble is that since so much business in Australia uses
beer as a valid currency (you may laugh, but I refer the skeptics to
do their homework and look up something called the 'Rum Rebellion'),
sales and marketing folks are thus a heavy drinking bunch and any major
tradeshow experience is an exercise in liver collapse.

I vaguely recall a nice Japanese restaurant, a lot of beer and wine,
a table that kept growing ("Another table your highness, I have more
clients on the way...") and then at some point we all poured ourselves
into the lobby bar and kept falling off the funky furniture (all cleverly
designed, I'm sure, to keep the beautiful people on their toes). Bernard
eventually gave up even trying to look comfortable on the weird mushroom
shaped seat he was left to deal with, and just started dancing with
some very scary looking locals. It was very amusing to watch, and we
have the photos to prove it.

Sometime later, after drinking some very nice cognac, it was time to go
home, it was way past Beer O'Clock.