What I learned at CES

Thoughts inspired by CES 2009 in Las Vegas:

There are some conditions under which it makes sense to have nothing but a drink for lunch. Walking seven miles on tradeshow floors before noon is one of them.

The days of cool giveaways appear to be over. Gone are the tee-shirts, water bottles, sports bags, even key-chains. (I got ten years’ worth of tees to wear to the gym from one Comdex show; and a bag to schlep them in from an InterOp.) These days you’re lucky to find a piece of hard candy or even a cheap pen. Times are officially, definitely hard.

Wolfgang Puck’s pizza crust isn’t a patch on my neighbor Heather’s.

Having a “name” company on your convention badge is an invitation for people to vent or to hit you up for free advice/help. For the guy at the SilversSummit whose mother wants to create a brain-fitness website but needs a tech company to help her develop and host it—I’m not your conduit to success. No amount of following me around the room asking for my business card or email is going to change that. (If I’d had the name of my last employer on the badge, no one would have noticed I exist.)

I hate being indoors where people are smoking.

I’m not that wild about being outdoors where people are smoking.

What is it with Glaswegians’ aversion to personal hygiene? I was talking with the CEO of a company that’s bringing to market a seemingly cool device (although the $1000 price point is problematic), and his breath about to melted the titanium frames to my glasses. And I wasn’t in that close proximity to him.

I so definitely need to lose weight—this was grueling. But there were people there with a good 100+ pounds on me, and people in their 70s (from the looks of them) cruising the floor. How do they do that?

Playing piano at Nordstrom is not the most demeaning job in the music world. Singing arias in Renaissance dress as part of the “Streetosphere” isn’t even the worst. Poling a gondola for tourons on an indoor fake “Grand Canal” and singing truncated arias is the worst.

After a day on the trade show floor, the only thing that keeps me from total crippling is a bath with Japanese mineral salts. If those of the male persuasion think that's too girly, well, I guess you have to suffer for your machismo.

When you are a waiter in a jumped-up, grotesquely overpriced Mexican restaurant within a closed hotel ecosystem serving mediocre food to captive tourists and conventioneers, attitude is a tip-limiting move. It’s also ludicrous.

Eating in any restaurant that caters to tourists and conventioneers is a crap shoot: they for sure don’t care about repeat business. (Corollary, learned while at William & Mary: never eat at a restaurant that has parking for tourist coaches. Food will be bad and service surly.)

Never fly coach out of Vegas on a Sunday morning. Too close to people who obviously spent every waking moment of the previous two days in town drinking (and also none bathing). That stale distillate stench oozing out of them is hard to take. (I thought my seat-mate was going to hurl at one point, but he managed to keep it in.)

Vegas—so not my kind of place. It’s entirely dedicated to pandering to the worst instincts of humanity: greed, irresponsibility, excess, stupidity, selfishness, lust; if I’ve left anything out, them, too. Vegas doesn’t just encourage bad and self-destructive behavior; it depends on it.

These mega hotels are so huge it requires a big effort just to get outside—if you can find your way. All that relentless fantasy carefully calculated to over-stimulate your activities: no rest, keep moving, keep spending, until they’ve shaken the last nickel out of your pockets. Then buh-bye—make way for another coach- or plane-load of suckers.

Sometimes coming home is the best part of the journey. Even if it’s Seattle.