Years ago, when I was learning the ropes as an account manager for an exhibit house, I would've never been able to guess at all the ways an exhibiting plan can go awry. Today, with digital files on thumb drives and fabric graphics panels instead of breakable ones, exhibitors at least have a fighting chance at a quick solution. But before those things were around, we had to come up with some pretty clever ways to fix damaged graphics. In the process, I learned a little about keeping a sense of humor — and a lot about the importance of reading fine print.

One of my first exhibit-management jobs was for a client in the pharmaceutical industry that had a large display at an important show. As green as green could get, I was learning my way through the setup process alongside the client's reps by helping them supervise installation. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, but as we stood back to admire the finished display, we spotted a problem.

The booth had a series of Plexiglas panels with graphics transparencies laminated to them, each featuring one of the client's pharmaceutical products. And one of the panels had a crack all the way across it. These panels were huge — 4-by-8 feet each — and designed to be backlit. The one with the crack had a black background on the image, making the crack even more noticeable. I don't know if it came out of the crate damaged or if workers applied a little too much force when they were hanging it, but we couldn't leave it like that.

This was back in the day when transparencies were either taped or laminated to Plexiglas to create a graphics panel, and nobody had digital files on a jump drive to replace one if it was damaged. We called the client's corporate office to have a new panel sent, but the show was set to open the following day, so there was no opportunity to have something overnighted to the venue before the doors opened. We could have put black tape across the crack if we wanted the exhibit to look as disheveled as a hobo, I guess, but our only other solution was to come up with an image so we could create a new transparency on an unbroken panel.

We stood around scratching our heads for a couple of minutes, and then the client's staffers had a great idea: We could use an ad we ran in the show directory, which was similar to the image on the broken panel. Taped onto a new panel, it would help us limp through the first day of the show while we waited for replacement graphics to be shipped. It was a perfect solution. Well, almost.

A local print shop did a rush job of creating the transparency, which the shop delivered to the venue early the following morning. The convention center's labor crew had been alerted to the plan, so they were waiting to apply it to a fresh piece of Plexiglas as soon as it arrived.

That morning, as I rounded the aisle leading to the booth space, I was slightly alarmed to see a rather sizeable crowd assembled around my client's exhibit — and most of them were laughing.

The replacement graphics panel was up, and from a distance it looked OK. It featured one of my client's flagship products, a rectal suppository that could effectively deliver medication with minimal discomfort thanks to its small size. The image had a suppository wrapped in foil along with some product information, and it looked exactly like the panel that had been cracked the day before — with one exception. The magazine ad was intended to promote the petite size of the product, so underneath the 1-inch-long suppository pictured were the words "Shown actual size." In our haste to solve the problem, none of us had caught that teensy difference between the ad and our original graphics, and now we had an image of an 18-inch-long suppository touted as the product's actual size.

My mouth went dry, and I saw my fledgling career pass before my eyes as I stood there surrounded by guffawing exhibitors. While they were having a good laugh, I went searching for the client with panic in my eyes. Reps from the company were huddled off to the side in the display, and guess what? They weren't laughing.

Our options were grim. We could take the panel down completely, but it would leave a gaping hole in our graphics-panel design. We could cover the problematic words with black tape or marker and look like we had a shabby, rinky-dink display. Or we could leave it as it was for the day and hope that the physician attendees had a sense of humor about our football-sized suppository — and knew we would never promote such a thing as convenient or comfortable. That solution, of course, would also mean being laughed at for the rest of the day.

In the end, we went for the shabby look with a strip of black gaffer's tape as the least of the evils that faced us. Much to my surprise, once the backlight was turned on for the graphics, the tape was hardly noticeable. You could see it if you were looking for it or if you walked up really close to the panel, but otherwise the solution was going to work much better than I had envisioned. But it was too late for our reputation among exhibitors, as the lore of the giant suppository had traveled through the show floor. While using the ad hadn't been my idea, I still grimaced every time another exhibitor brought it up.

In fact, it's taken me years to live it down, and I'm not even sure I have yet. Even so, I learned an important lesson about the devil being in the details from that trade show, and it's helped me maneuver my way around a lot of exhibiting mishaps that have happened since then. But nothing has made me the butt of jokes — pun intended — quite like that did.