Too Good to "B" True?

quiz

Ever since its debut 20 years ago, Plan B — featuring the real-life accounts of trade show tribulations — has consistently ranked among readers' favorite columns. Ranging from floods to pickpockets, the tales of exhibit emergencies are often stranger than fiction. To prove it, we selected some of our favorite stories, and made up a few of our own. See if you can tell the fiction from the nonfiction in this month's quiz. By Charles Pappas


Booth staffers crammed tropical fish into their pockets after an aquarium burst, spewing 1,000 gallons of saltwater and scores of rare aquatic creatures onto the trade show floor.		An exhibit manager at a law-enforcement expo thought he had a half-dozen hot prospects in his booth — until he realized they were prisoners on work release.


It was almost game over when an exhibitor's Sintra panels melted like cheese on a hot plate of nachos in transit to the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.	When Sony Corp.'s entire staff at the International Consumer Electronics Show came down with a mysterious virus, the company reprogrammed a team of robots to act as greeters in its booth.		After neglecting to ship her signage, literature, and giveaways to the show, one exhibit manager drummed up traffic by hiring her sister to tell attendees to visit the booth and see what a scatterbrained dingbat her sibling really was.


Things quickly went to the dogs when an exhibitor at a beauty expo received the wrong booth — one built for a pet trade show.		The 200 attendees dressed like fiends and freaks at a haunted-attraction expo weren't half as scary as the Secret Service agents — there to protect a presidential candidate in the same hotel — rounding them up at gunpoint.


The fire marshal gave this exhibitor's in-booth presentation a death sentence when he refused to allow a fake electric chair into the venue. Thankfully, he commuted that sentence after an electrician confirmed that since the faux prop clearly had no power cord, it couldn't possibly be plugged in — making the cobbled-together contraption shockingly safe.		After his booth for a construction show went AWOL, one inventive marketer built an exhibit out of shipping pallets and rolls of tape sold by a neighboring exhibitor.
		It's a safe bet there aren't too many exhibitors like the one who temporarily lost $200,000 worth of computer equipment when the truck driver hauling her booth pretended he was beaten up and his vehicle hijacked to conceal losing his money in a casino en route to the show.