The Not-OK Corral

The desert heat can do crazy things to people. Between the sweltering temperatures and the moisture-sucking hot air, it's a miracle the inhabitants of Las Vegas don't all go insane. It's no surprise, then, that when a bit of desert-inspired insanity came my way during setup for a trade show in Sin City, I almost went off the deep end.

As the general manager of a full-service exhibit house, I spend a lot of time in Las Vegas helping my clients with booth installation. At a major retail-industry show in 2004, one of my clients had a 40-by-40-foot booth for which I was to oversee the installation. The custom-built exhibit had been made specifically for this show at the Las Vegas Convention Center, so the client had decided to store the booth locally so it wouldn't need to be shipped to the show year after year.

Since my company didn't have a storage facility in the area, we contracted with a respected business that had a storage warehouse in Las Vegas. So the company seemed like a safe bet.

Unfortunately, the storage company's owner ran into some financial difficulty in 2003, and he notified all his clients - myself included - that he'd be moving the items from his pricey Vegas facility to a more cost-effective place in nearby Pahrump, NV. While this seemed like a minor inconvenience at first, it turned into a crazy desert fiasco.

The day the floor opened for move-in, my labor crew and I waited in my client's booth space. Soon, however, it became apparent that our booth was running a bit late. According to the show manual, there was a four-hour window for carpet install, and exhibit materials would be moved in after that so show management could lay the aisle carpet. Exhibits would then be built starting the next day - a Thursday - and aside from minor touchups, everything needed to be finished by Saturday evening. As we waited impatiently for our flooring on Wednesday, though, we had little idea just how badly we were about to mess with show management's schedule.

Growing impatient, I called the owner of the storage company to ask about my carpet. He informed me that the truck was in traffic and would arrive shortly. When "shortly" had long since passed, I called again. This time he told me there had been trouble loading the items, but he'd have our materials to us within an hour.

After another hour had come and gone, I took matters into my own hands. Something about this didn't feel right, so I rented a car and set out for the address of the warehouse in Pahrump. The whole drive there, I prayed that somehow the exhibit was passing me on the highway. I hoped that the nagging voice in my head was just me being overly cautious.

But when I arrived at the address, I nearly had a stroke. Before me were a ranch house and barn surrounded by horse corrals. Stacked in the corrals were the crates containing my client's exhibit. Apparently, the warehouse owner had moved all the items from his storage location to the great outdoors.

I knocked on the door of the house, and the owner answered. He gave me a sob story about his financial difficulties and how he'd moved everything from his warehouse out to his horse ranch in the desert. Since he was clearly no help, I hightailed it down to the not-OK corral and inspected the crates.

As I suspected, the booth components were a disaster. The carpet had been ruined by dry rot and one of the crates was even inhabited by a nest of wasps, which sent me, temporarily, running for cover. Having sat out in the sun and wind for a couple of months, the laminates inside each crate were now bleached and cracked. Worse, many of the crates had been damaged by the elements and weren't likely to stand up to the abuse of being carted around on forklifts without falling apart.

I was in a panic. If I was going to get my client's exhibit built, I knew I'd need some serious help. So I quickly called my labor crew on the show floor, Dallas-based NuVista Inc. I told the I&D foreman to get us some rental carpet from the general contractor, and that we'd need a lot more hands than the crew I'd originally arranged.

After my foreman ordered the exhibit carpet and additional crew, he had a word with show management about our troubles, begging for - and finally receiving - permission to bring in items past the move-in deadline and work late into the night.

While one crew from NuVista joined me at the corral to see what we could salvage, a second team from the labor company went to our local shop to start the refurbishing and rebuilding work on the exhibit components. With roughly 40 crates to go through, time was not on my side. Each crate needed to be inspected for damages. While any crates without damage would be sent to the show immediately, the rest, which ended up being about 80 percent of the crates, would be sent to our shop for refurbishment.

With my labor crew's help, my colleagues at our Las Vegas shop worked through that first night and all the way into the next evening refurbishing laminate panels and rotted wood. We also fixed and replaced several of the crates. Rather than waiting for all the components and crates to be complete, we hauled them to the convention center in small batches. So as soon as three or four crates full of refurbished goods were ready, we transported them to the exhibit hall, allowing our team there to get a start on assembly.

Meanwhile, back at the convention center, the crew installed the carpet just as our slow trickle of crates started to reach the show hall. The crew quickly assembled each batch as it arrived, working well past the close of the hall on Thursday. On Friday and Saturday, the same pattern continued, as the crew started early, built whatever they could with the pieces as they arrived, and waited for another delivery - repeating the process long after the official installation time.

While most exhibits had been completed on time Saturday evening, we were still building the exhibit late Saturday night. But we finally finished the booth in the wee hours of the morning. It had taken three extremely long days and a crew twice the size I had originally planned in order to pull it off, but the exhibit had turned out perfectly. When the client arrived on Sunday to take care of last-minute details, the finished exhibit looked exactly like it was supposed to look.

Needless to say, when the show ended, we informed the client we were moving its exhibit to a new (indoor) storage facility.

- Lonnie Miller, general manager, ExpoDisplays Inc., Birmingham, AL