By Katie Rivera, Director of Marketing Communications
For anyone who has worked in the trade show industry, planned a trade show, or exhibited at a trade show, you may already be aware that nothing with trade shows ever goes according to plan. You can spend a lot of time and effort planning everything to a tee, and it still doesn’t matter, because it’s almost a guarantee that something will go wrong.
For SC22, things started to go wrong at our previous show, AUSA in Washington D.C. in October. A pallet with most of the OSS products we needed for SC, all our trade show supplies and 3 of our TVs went missing at the end of AUSA. When our carrier checked in to pick it up, they were told it was already gone. Our booth crate was still there and went on to Dallas as originally planned.
I immediately started contacting exhibitors who were near our booth to notify them that our pallet might have accidentally been picked up with their shipment. The show logistics company also started trying to find it, but eventually declared it lost exactly 2 weeks before I was set to leave for Dallas. Then one day later, one of the exhibitors I had contacted received our pallet at their warehouse in New York. Thankfully we still had plenty of time to reroute it to Dallas, but I had already started contingency plans for how to replace everything on that pallet. Luckily, I didn’t need those contingency plans.
This four-and-a-half minute time-lapse spans four-and-a-half days during setup at SC22. You get to see a bare 20x30 concrete floor turn into the OSS booth, ready for the SC22 Opening Gala where we showcase our entire line of AI Transportable products.
As I mentioned in the video, if you want to read more about the immersion-cooled Rigel, we released a press release about the solution we presented with our partners TMGcore and NVIDIA.
Even though so many different things went wrong during the setup, we just had to find the right solution, fix it, and move on. Despite all the setbacks, both minor and major, our booth was 100% ready for the show when it opened, and it was a great show for OSS, as I expected it would be.
How did I know SC22 was going to be good for us? During setup, we did have one omen of good luck (depending on who you ask). Here’s a 30 second bonus video that shows what happened.
Yep, that’s right. A pigeon pooped on our booth, not once but twice. The first time it happened, it got not only on the blue counter, but also the carpet. I honestly didn’t realize what it was at first, I just cleaned it up using paper towels on the counter, and then luckily, I had a bottle of carpet cleaner and a brush for the carpet. But about 5 minutes later, one of the carpenters said there’s something on the blue counter and he wasn’t sure what it was.
Once I saw it, I realized immediately, looked up and sure enough, there was a pigeon right above us. Thankfully one of the rigging crew was willing to go up and shoo the bird away from our booth. That’s why when it comes to trade shows, I always plan for the worst and hope for the best, and thankfully we were able to overcome the worst, and everything turned out great.
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