Against All Odds

As a trade show specialist for transportation-logistics provider AFMS Logistics Management Group, I had heard plenty about the horror of arriving at a trade show only to find your exhibit didn't beat you there. While I personally managed to dodge that bullet, I'd witnessed enough to know it's the kind of situation that takes a few years off your life. Not interested in shortening my life at all, I like as much guarantee as I can get that my booth will be where it needs to be when it needs to be there.

So when I had two back-to-back shows in Chicago, I felt especially relaxed because once everything got to the Windy City, I had nothing to worry about. The first show, the Assembly and Automation Technology Expo at McCormick Place, would end on a Friday, and the second, the Parcel Forum, would start setup the following Monday at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, literally a few hundred feet away. I would not be attending the first show, but was scheduled to fly in from our Portland, OR, office on Sunday night so I could manage the second.

My arrangements for the first show had gone off without a hitch. So that Friday, all the carrier had to do was move our 10-by-10-foot booth and its accessories across the street. All I had to do was show up with the sales team on Monday morning and go to work. It was just so easy. So when I settled into the Hyatt Sunday evening, I didn't have a care in the world.

On Monday morning, I strolled downstairs to the exhibit hall to make sure our shipment made it onto the show floor. What I found, however, was an empty exhibit space. Setup was starting after lunch, with the doors slated to open at noon the following day, and while my spider-frame exhibit wasn't difficult to erect and organize, not having the actual booth was going to make that setup an awful lot trickier.

After a quick trip to the Hyatt's loading dock to ask where my booth was, workers there stared at me blankly. "Sorry, sir. There's no AFMS shipment here," they said. I stared back, and I'm sure my mouth was hanging open. "You can't be serious," I thought. I mean really, where did it go?

Good question, it turns out. I called the carrier, who also had no idea. "We'll get back to you," the gal on the phone said. Still believing it must be sitting on a loading dock somewhere, I wasn't overly concerned at first. But the morning stretched on with no booth and no word, and by midday, I needed some answers.

My second conversation with the carrier's phone representative went a lot worse than the first. "I hate to tell you this," she said, "but your booth is on its way to Portland. And it's on a train. And we can't get it off." Apparently, a billing clerk had misread the shipping document and sent our entire exhibit, literature, monitor, and laminator back to the AFMS billing address in Portland.

At that moment, I wanted to shake my fist at the universe, pound my head on a flat surface, or turn into Superman so I could stop that moving train. But the clock was ticking, and what I really needed to do was get myself an exhibit.
My only hope was to have another exhibit and all the supplies we needed shipped to me from our Portland office. Given the time-zone difference, it was approaching 2 p.m. in Chicago but was still just noon in Portland. Nevertheless, the staff was going to need every minute up to the 4 p.m. FedEx pickup time to assemble an overnight shipment.

My co-workers got right to work, pulling an older backup exhibit out of storage and assembling the literature and tool kit filled with setup supplies, a laminator, notepads, and all the other little things we would need. The monitor was going to have to be rented in Chicago, but a quick call to the show organizer had one secured and ready to be delivered to us the next day. Meanwhile, back at the home office, the crew made the 4 p.m. deadline and handed off a replacement exhibit with supplies to FedEx, who guaranteed delivery to the Hyatt Regency by the next morning. As I got word that the shipment had gone out, I breathed a quick sigh of relief. Whew! The exhibit was on its way.

The next morning, our two salespeople and I waited expectantly for our shipment to appear on the show floor. But the 10:30 a.m. guaranteed delivery time came and went, and still no exhibit. It seemed this situation had grown from not good to really, really bad. Soon the show floor would fill with people, and the three of us were dangerously close to being found standing in an empty exhibit space with nothing but a few business cards, a monitor, and our charm.

I quickly started calling anyone and everyone in the hunt for this exhibit - FedEx, hotel personnel, the home office, my mom (just kidding, but I would have called my mom if I thought she knew where this infernal exhibit was).

During my phone rounds, FedEx confirmed that it had delivered the shipment to the loading dock of the Hyatt by 10:30 a.m. However, the dock workers lacked the sense of urgency this situation required. Between 10:30 a.m. and 11:15 a.m., I made so many calls to the hotel's loading-dock personnel that they were probably thinking about getting a restraining order. But finally, 45 minutes before the exhibit-hall doors opened, our booth was delivered to the show floor.

The flurry of putting together an exhibit in 45 minutes that usually takes the better part of an afternoon was a bit of a blur, but somehow when the show opened at noon, we were ready - dripping sweat, but ready. In the end, the show went perfectly, and I'm pretty sure no one ever suspected the chaos in our booth just minutes before they arrived.

After the show, I went back to our original carrier to seek reimbursement for the overnight shipping we'd incurred fixing the carrier's mistake. The company gave us a credit for shipping the extra booth back to Portland, but informed me that it has an expedited shipping service, and if I'd asked it to send the replacement exhibit, it would have done so for free. I wanted to say I didn't do that because I needed my booth at the Hyatt Regency, not who knows where it was going to send the next one, but I decided to cut my losses and count it as an expensive lesson learned.

I also learned that there's no such thing as a piece of cake in the trade show business, no matter how easy it looks on paper. And while a missing exhibit probably won't take years off my life, I'd rather not tempt fate by going through that again, just in case.

- Thomas Stanton, trade show specialist, AFMS Logistics Management Group, Portland, OR