Years ago as a supervisor for an exhibit house, I had a client with setups so massive that it would take every minute of the install window to get its display in place and then some. For this reason, I always negotiated with the general services contractor for each show to see if we could wheedle any extra time on the show floor.

Preparing for a show in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, I had worked just such a deal, and so I showed up a day before the official move-in day to get started. For this show we would be hanging a 40-foot triangular rigging with a sign so heavy it took chain loaders to lift it. Because my client was one of the biggest exhibitors on the show floor, and because the Hynes Convention Center is an archaic former high school turned exhibit venue that is difficult to navigate with heavy equipment, the GSC had given us a half-day head start.

When I arrived at the convention center, I scanned the people milling about the lobby in search of my lead installation-and-dismantle guy from Boston. We had done many shows together there, and when I didn't see him waiting for me, I assumed he was probably already at the booth. We had a union boom-lift crew scheduled to meet us on the show floor, and we didn't have time to waste.

But as I headed to the show hall, I found him sitting at a table in the hallway. There was nothing going on around him, he wasn't anywhere near our booth space, and he didn't look happy. He shook his head and said, "Go ahead, have a look."

Passing through the doors to the exhibit hall, I felt like I might have just been teleported to a graveyard. Sprinkled throughout the hall were dozens of massive cemetery markers and mausoleums. Some were marble, some were stone, all were thousands of pounds, and one that was especially enormous was sitting square in the middle of my booth space.

When I say enormous, I mean a mausoleum that was 8 feet tall, 5 feet wide, 10 feet long, and made of marble. It easily weighed 2 tons, maybe more, and there was no sliding this thing out of the way. One end was open so that a couple of caskets could be slid inside, and for a minute I wondered if it could be used for me and my I&D guy. Etched deeply into the marble on each side was the word "Casper," as in the friendly ghost. My mouth opened, then shut. I couldn't think of a thing to say.

Making the scene even more surreal, green AstroTurf, which had obviously covered the floor during this show, had been cut away except for patches left around each tombstone. The effect was that of a freakish-looking faux graveyard sprawling across the otherwise empty exhibit hall, causing a chill to crawl up my spine.

I spun around looking for my rigging crew and lift, but the only guy standing there waiting to talk to me was Jim, a gruff, old teamster foreman for the convention center. He was the quintessential order-barking, head-decapitating teamster boss who had struck fear into the hearts of many, but for some reason had taken a liking to me over the years. As he watched me absorb the grim reality of my situation, his eyes were twinkling, and I knew he was laughing at me. In fact, everyone was laughing, except me and my I&D guy.

Because it was formerly constructed as a high school, the venue was not laid out to handle heavy equipment or large display components. Teamsters were actually going to have to bring a crane down an elevator to pick up Casper and the other monuments, and then they needed to move each of those markers back through that elevator to get them to the loading dock. Even though the GSC had agreed to the setup time, it was not going to happen.

"Spahhhky," Jim drawled at me in his deep Bostonian accent, "I suggest you walk across the street to the bahhh, and have a couple beehhs. The crane will be heah this aftanoon to remove Caspah." Now, if you don't speak Boston teamster, what he was telling me was to get out of his way. They would unload my truck, he said, at 8 a.m. the following day.

My I&D guy and I looked at each other and laughed. We knew there was nothing to be gained arguing with Jim, so off to the watering hole we went. Thankfully he was the only guy I had on the clock, because I was basically paying him to drink with me at that point. It wasn't something I would have ordinarily mentioned to my client rep, except that she called me later that afternoon and asked if she should come meet us at the venue. "Uh, not exactly," I told her. She was surprised and asked if we had finished up early. "Uh, not exactly," I said again. "How about a beer?"

So she met us at the bar, and I bought her a cold one while I told her about Casper, and Jim, and the ridiculousness of the whole thing. On the bright side, Jim had canceled the union labor I had for the day, so I wasn't going to incur those extra charges. But on the not-so-bright side, we lost our valuable head start.

The next day we met back at our exhibit space at 8 a.m. and worked feverishly with the crew to get our exhibit installed. We finished late the night before the trade show opened, an impressive feat given the size of the display. That extra time I'd planned for would have been nice, but it was comforting to know we could get it done without it if we had to, because who knows when another gravestone convention will come along. At least the ordeal was funny, because lord knows there are two saviors that get you through the day when things go wrong as an exhibit manager: the ability to laugh at the situations you face, and a bar across the street that helps you find the humor in them.

— Sparky Sanford, account director, H.B. Stubbs Co., Seattle