The next morning I skipped breakfast, not ready to eat food yet. I got to the show and started up the demo and then stood there all day. There is really nothing more soul draining than working a booth at a tradeshow. There is so much downtime where you are just standing there bored to tears and counting the seconds to freedom. After I while I couldn’t take it any longer so I left to walk around the show floor for a while. Even the show floor seemed pretty boring to me, just a bunch of companies spending too much money on extravagant booths. There were also many girls there in very skimpy outfits, hired by the companies to bring attention to the booth. This really seems out of place to me. I mean, I’d expect it at a beer convention, but these are respected, professional companies, and they are paying scantily clad women to draw people in. I thought “Surely such a large and international company like Microsoft wouldn’t stoop to such levels.” So I made a point to visit their booth to confirm my faith in my alma mater. But I was dead wrong, there was a tall Asian girl in a tiny tank top and miniskirt plastered with Windows and Microsoft logos. Shameful.
During my day of boredom, I met a few guys that go to most of the shows for TI, an Indian guy named Suman and a French fellow named Robert. I chatted a bit with them over lunch, and by the end of the show they had invited me to dinner with them. We went to a Thai restaurant in Taipei 101 and had a delicious dinner (paid for by Suman, who worked for TI). We had a few beers with the meal and I think I had a little more than I should have. I didn’t make a fool of myself, but I definitely felt a little sloppy. I’m guessing they didn’t even notice, but I had concentrate a little harder to keep my speech regular.
After dinner it was back to the hotel for a good night’s rest.
The next day at the show was twice as bad as the first. Pain upon pain, boredom upon boredom, I will try my very hardest to never work another show as long as I live! That night Tomo, Fukuchi-san, and I went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. This time I told him I didn’t want any weird stuff. He said ok, and ordered a bunch of stuff (the menu was only in Chinese, so I still had to trust him). The first thing that came was pureed fish liver, he told me not to eat this one. But it didn’t sound too bad to me, so I tried some… it tasted like salmon paste; not something I’d order on a regular basis, but it wasn’t gross. The rest of the meal was pretty normal stuff including some “chicken” which I could tell from the goofy way Tomo was acting that it wasn’t really chicken. I figured it must really be frog, but that didn’t bother me either, so I ate it. The next day Tomo “revealed” to me that it was frog, not chicken… duh Tomo.
