The Show Must Go On (Part 3 -- Finale)

The day after the Dancing Bear demo, Friday, everyone needed to get out to HABSOC and set up the booth on Saturday and Sunday for the first day of the show on Monday. Ike took off and left the borrowed card reader for someone else to take. I hunted down another sales guy and loaded him up with it. Next, the IT guy took the new printer with him so he could use it at HABSOC instead of the one that was already out there. He thought it would somehow be a better demo with the new model. He's wrong, but whatever.

I get a call Sunday from Ike at HABSOC. Apparently the card reader's configuration changed in order to get the boardroom demo to work. He hadn't paid attention when I explained that I had already set up the HABSOC demos to configure the reader, just in case they needed it. He just needed to click on the shortcut that said "reconfigure reader." After that was out of the way he let me know that the IT guy was having problems with the new printer and had unfortunately done something that caused the old printer to no longer work. But not to worry. Getting the new one working "should be easy." Eventually they got the printer working to everyone's satisfaction. Never mind that both the reader and new printer were risks that could have been easily avoided. If everything actually turns out okay then your risks were only another case of developer "chicken little" syndrome. It kind of makes you wonder how these people make it this far in life.

While at HABSOC we bought a large plasma screen for presentations in the booth. We bought it and shipped it straight there. It arrived, we used it. The show went well. At the end of the show, someone boxed up the plasma in the original packaging (also known as the "steal this box" box) and left it on the trade show floor. Oddly, when we got back to the office in San Francisco the display was missing. Upon further investigation, no one knows where it went. Oops. It doesn't help that all of the sales guys were joking about stealing it before the show.

Before all of this crazy shit started happening, our doc person quit. We just moved those duties onto the development manager. Our support guy quit. We moved those duties onto sales and development. We laid off / fired the development manager (and doc writer now) and moved those duties onto the architect. We let everyone know that sales were a little flat. We put the HABSOC booth together. Two developers quit. And finally, I went on vacation. I could hardly wait to see what happened next. Surely nothing bad?