Excelling as an exhibitor-appointed service contractor in the trade show industry means being good at a lot of different things, from organizing and supervising to brainstorming and problem solving. But I never really expected one of those essential skills to be scavenging like Cinderella's mice to get her to the ball, or in this case to get my client's exhibit packed up and onto a truck.

A few years ago at the Fancy Food Show, I had a routine installation-and-dismantle gig for a longstanding client. After setting up its 10-by-20-foot exhibit, I marked the exhibit crates with "empty" labels and set them in the aisle for teamsters to pick up and store during the show. My client shipped some perishable food samples in a few additional crates, and those emptied containers got picked up and stored along with my crates in the back of the exhibit hall.

The morning after the show closed, I returned to the venue with a colleague to dismantle the exhibit. The client was supposed to have already packed up its food-display items and flown home the night before. So I expected to find my empty exhibit crates waiting in the aisle next to the client's packed food-display crates so we could get straight to work. When we got there, however, the food-display containers were gone, but so were my exhibit crates.

It's not uncommon for crates to go missing. Sometimes they get delivered a few booths away or stacked up at the end of an aisle to clear the way for dismantle equipment. Nonchalantly, I poked around the neighborhood and then scanned farther down around the ends of the aisles, but no crates.

A small prickle of fear went through me as I thought over the install in my mind: Had I made someone mad? Was it possible I'd irritated a teamster in some way and was thus being punished? I'm not saying they all do it, but everyone knows that if you get on a venue worker's bad side, sometimes your containers get unloaded for you in the most obscure place possible, like the staff lounge or a dark hallway. After chewing on it for a minute, I was certain I hadn't had any run-ins that could have led to crate banishment, although I realized I had no way of knowing whether the client did or not.

Eventually, I decided to track down the floor freight manager to ask about the crates, but he just gave me a shrug and told me to check with the service desk. There, the clerk looked at me curiously and produced a stack of shipping labels for all the crates, the ones the client was supposed to be packing and the ones I was there to pack. "Your containers are on a truck headed for the airfreight terminal," she said. My response, of course, was a dumb stare. "But they are empty," I said, demanding to know why they'd been picked up in the aisle and shipped.

Well, according to the clerk, my client's ever-helpful booth staff went ahead and slapped destination labels on all the crates after the teamsters delivered them the evening before. Then, after packing up their portion of the display, the staffers handed all the labels over to the service desk. Forklift drivers did exactly what they were supposed to – they picked up all the labeled crates and took them away.

But now I had a 10-by-20-foot exhibit to ship back home without even a baggie to put screws into, much less the protective clamshell containers that would keep the $25,000 exhibit safe on its journey. I was in a world of hurt, and I needed to come up with some kind of MacGyver solution fast.

I looked around with the eyes of a scavenger. If MacGyver could make a bomb out of chewing gum and a paper clip, I could make some exhibit packaging out of the cast-off materials lying around the exhibit hall.

Hunched over, I scrounged through piles of debris like a mendicant, examining lengths of cardboard and scraps of Bubble Wrap for their usefulness. Like a ninja shoplifter, I cruised through the aisles snatching vinyl table coverings out of vacated exhibits, and grabbing up discarded sheets of foam and anything else I could get my hands on along the way. I sweet-talked someone into giving me a pallet, and I accepted more than a few pity donations of leftover materials from some I&D crews that were glad they weren't me.

At the booth, my colleague and I took the exhibit apart and carefully wrapped each piece with the vinyl table coverings I'd commandeered before sandwiching it between scraps of cardboard or Bubble Wrap. Around the items on the pallet, I built a makeshift wall out of cardboard to protect the edges, and then I shrink-wrapped the hell out of the whole thing. It wasn't pretty, but it was going to get home safe.

As I ran 'round and 'round the garbage-barge-looking mound with shrink-wrap, I thought about the number of freakish ways a plan can go bad, even when a job seems really routine. I realized that while part of my job is to anticipate problems, another part of it will always be having a Plan B fix up my sleeve.

So now, even if I've got a perfectly laid plan with the exhibit manager, I always talk to the people who will be staffing the booth to make sure we're all on the same page as well. And I try to resist the urge to hoard packing supplies, though I'm constantly eyeing piles potentially useful, life-saving rubbish that could be transformed into makeshift crates. But perhaps most importantly, I tell my clients that it's really OK if they don't try to surprise me by being overly helpful. E

– Jason Schmidt, general partner, Schmidt Exhibitor Services Inc., Menlo Park, CA