My Booth Falls to Pieces

There was a lot riding on the National Association of Student Financial Aid Advisors show in Seattle in 2006 — including my future. Having just quit my job as a theatrical set designer, I was hoping to return to my marketing roots with student-loan provider Education Finance Partners Inc. I’d been freelancing with the company for a while, but my contract expired soon, so NASFAA would be my tryout for a full-time marketing job with the company.

As a new player in the student-loan industry, Education Finance Partners shopped around for a rental exhibit. When it couldn’t find the right rental, it asked me to custom build its booth for the show. I was given 29 days — an eternity to a set designer — to build the booth and have it ready to ship from San Francisco to Seattle, I eagerly agreed.

As it turned out, however, I needed every minute of that “eternity.” After 29 days of work and with my booth set to ship out at noon, I completed my finishing touches at 5 a.m. Then I pulled out my custom-made crates and packed up the whole shebang, including a center island that doubled as a projection screen, along with four kiosks featuring frosted-glass panels with the company’s logo and plasma screens that ran informative videos.

It had been hard work, but I had beaten the deadline, and my future with the company looked promising. With the booth crated and on the truck, I figured I could show up the morning of the show, pat myself on the back for a job well done, and watch the on-site union guys put together the exhibit. But when I arrived on the show floor the morning NASFAA opened, there was nothing to show for all of my hard work. My crates were not in my exhibit space, and I had only about eight hours to find them and get the booth set up before the show opened at 4:30 p.m. A quick call to my freight handler revealed that my booth was only a few miles away. And what’s more, the freight handler promised that it would be delivered around noon.

Sure enough, my booth showed up at 11:30 a.m. So, I figured my bad luck had run its course.

When I opened my custom-built crates a few minutes later, however, I quickly realized my bad luck hadn’t left me yet. Instead of my neatly packed booth components, I found twisted aluminum trussing, broken fasteners, and smashed AV equipment. Amid the custom-built rubble also lay my dreams of a full-time job. With five hours to go, I had little time to spare, and a whole lot of broken booth components to fix.

At this point, some people would have handed the problem off to the union guys and watched as they tried to repair and erect the booth. But I just couldn’t do it. This booth was my baby, and my baby was battered, bruised, and in need of some serious creativity to fix it. So with no union guys in sight, my marketing director and I started breaking every union rule in the joint.

Fortunately, I had packed plenty of spare fasteners in my toolkit, so our first crime was replacing the broken fasteners, which surely took more than the hour allotted before union labor is required. With the two of us working together, we also broke the union’s one-person setup rule. And by using power tools to fix some items, I broke the union’s rule against the use of anything but basic hand tools.

All was going well until a couple of hours into our repair job, when we got busted. A union boss showed up out of nowhere and asked to see our union ID cards. Not wanting to slow down or give in at this point, I told the union boss I didn’t have one and admitted that I was the designer, not part of the union crew. However, I also reminded him — in an ever-so-politically-correct manner — that since I had built the original booth, I was certain I would be the only person who could rebuild it in time for the show.

The subcontractor's account executive explained that if I paid for four hours of union labor, I could continue to rebuild my booth components with the help of the union guys. After all of the work I'd done, I wasn't about to abandon the job completely, so I agreed in order to keep the job moving with the aid of the unexpected crew.

With three union guys soon on hand, I made a list of items I still needed — a new plasma screen, a DVD player, and paint to cover spots that had been chipped or stripped — and sent my marketing director out to find them. Since I had already fixed most of the mangled pieces, the union guys helped me set up the rest of the booth, which was less about assembling and more about lifting large, heavy components into place.

When my marketing director returned, we finished setting up the AV equipment, and by 4 p.m., the union guys began to clean up around the booth. At 4:15 p.m., I started touching up some paint, and I finished right at 4:30 p.m. While I was furiously fanning my wet paint as the first attendees strolled into the exhibit hall, we’d managed to rebuild and set up my booth just in time.

Of course, I figured this kind of debacle was a far cry from the flawless booth I’d hoped to deliver for my would-be employer. And to make matters worse, the booth’s return trip to the office proved disastrous as well. When I opened the crates back at the office, I discovered it was almost as battered and bruised as I’d found it on the show floor.

Naturally, when I was called into the boss’s office a week after the show, I was certain I’d be told, “Thank you and goodbye.” So I was completely flabbergasted when I was offered a full-time job. Though no one said it, I suspect they liked how I took charge in a crisis — and in retrospect, my disaster may have actually helped me gain full-time employment.

— Chris Denny, marketing and communications manager, Education Finance Partners Inc., San Francisco