In which our correspondent goes into battle at a trade fair and just about comes out alive...
Business travel has its perks – and its downsides. For every cancelled meeting that frees up an afternoon to explore a city or grab a round of golf, there are Friday evening flights home delayed or cancelled thanks to industrial action. Some days you can stroll through the shopping district of Paris, Berlin, Madrid or Milan and be home a few hours later for supper, while on others it would have been easier to buy a second-hand car and drive across Europe than rely on scheduled airlines.
Yet for all the slings and arrows of business travel, it was only on a recent week-long trip that I realised just how lucky I am. What brought about the revelation? I had to man a booth at a trade fair.
I have attended them in the past, but only as a guest and never for longer than a day. The core idea behind them is a sensible one. A lot of suppliers are gathered together, the buyers attend, we all share knowledge, sell or resist being sold to, and go home with our pockets full of business cards. Yes, they can be expensive since the organisers charge a lot for stand space, but if you get enough sales out of it the investment is worthwhile. And you can also see what your competitors are doing.
Such had always been my understanding, until a colleague was ill, we had a new product to promote and I found myself in the frame to be part of the sales push.
Nothing could have prepared me for the particular mix of stress and existential ennui of being on that stand for a week. It is called a stand, and that’s what I did, stand, for hours. They say you “man” it but this doesn’t strike me as man’s work at all, nor woman’s. Really, who or what it would suit is one of those new-fangled holograms that simply repeats the same spiel endlessly, with an unerring level of enthusiasm.
My memories of childhood are of frequently being bored and, viewed from the present, when I am very busy, boredom acquires a nostalgic tinge. No more. Now I have been to a trade fair I’ve remembered what boredom is like, and it’s awful. It’s even worse than when you were a child, when time was something that could be wasted because you had decades of it ahead of you. Being bored in your forties and fifties is excruciating. You’d much rather be learning French, or spending time with your kids, or in bed.
Then there’s the food, which is invariably awful and so expensive they take credit cards to cover the bill. I had to queue for ten minutes to pick up a hot dog, a burger or an anaemic sandwich. This I augmented with the boiled sweets we were offering in a bowl by the front desk. I ate so many I had a mouth ulcer at the end of the first day.
Do you ever miss natural light? Of course not – if you did, you’d just stick your head out of a window. Not at a trade fair. There aren’t any windows – it’s like a Las Vegas casino, without the gambling. After the first few days my health started to fail. Germs thrive in this atmosphere, transmitted by the constant shaking of hands and, among some of my continental friends, air kissing.
At the exhibition hotel there was a turndown gift of some fizzy vitamin tablets on the first night. I thought it strange, but now I know they do it to lessen the number of ambulances they have to call for guests who have come down with some debilitating virus. One colleague had a tube of hand sanitiser in his pocket to keep bugs at bay. It’s a good tip – if we were meant to shake this many hands in a week we’d have been born with royal blood. It must be why the Queen wears gloves.
So was it all misery? Well, I’m ashamed to say that the hardest I laughed all week was when someone leaned against a neighbouring booth and the whole thing fell down. It wasn’t just watching it collapse in slow motion that was so amusing, nor was it the big sign that ended up resting on someone’s head, but more the astonishment of the person who’d been hiding in the little room at the back when they were suddenly exposed by the disappearing walls. Very Buster Keaton.
By the end of the week I’d like to say that some form of camaraderie had formed among my fellow “man standers”, but that would not be true. Despite the terrible conditions, this was not a situation for which war analogies would be appropriate, other than to say that after five days I could recognise those who had shared my experience. They had the 1,000-yard stare of the trade fair veteran – a distant look as they focused on somewhere else, a place without strip lights, tinned music and corporate videos on a permanent loop.
Not a bonding experience as such, but a good life lesson. No matter how bad things are, someone else has it worse. And the next time you go to a trade fair, be nice to the people on the stand. They may even give you a boiled sweet.
