The CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is by far the largest high-tech tradeshow in the country, maybe the world. With attendance allegedly down in all areas, it boasted 2,700 exhibitors last week in its permanent home in Las Vegas. Given the show’s overblown size, America’s most over-the-top city is probably the only place that could handle the world’s most over-the-top show. Truth is, and I am backed up by those I talked to in elevators, lobbies, airports, shuttles, monorails, and endless serpentine lines, the show is too big to be of much use to the attending public. The real value is the press you get, which can be consumed far easier outside the show. And like pop music reviews, there is rarely bad press at such an event.

A typical day during setup lasts 12 to 14 hours, and during this time it is okay to smell like BO and pizza and look like crap. During the show, the hours are much the same, only you have to look great and not smell at all.

As I’ve written previously, tradeshow booth monkeys like myself are sustained by day-old eight dollar hotdogs and as many mustard packets as we can consume during a 15-minute break. The backlash to this is all the beer drank after hours with colleagues we only see at these events. It is a proven recipe of carbs, protein, backaches, and hangovers on three hours of sleep a night.

I have sustained this diet and workload for over a decade. It is all I know, with the noted exception of a few early morning pulls of Schnapps when working the Musikmesse show in Frankfurt. But to get the Schnapps you have to be on the floor before 7:30am and make nice with the surly carpenters and electricians maintaining your booth. The hotdogs at Messe are quite good, though served on a Kaiser roll. A long sausage in a small round bun is the oddest bit of German engineering I have ever personally experienced. No one complains though, because the high-fructose carbonated beverage that usually accompanies the meal is replaced by pilsner.

Last week’s CES show is the first one I ever worked. Frankly, I was hoping to go through life without ever going to one. The music and pro audio shows NAMM and Messe are more my cup of tea. But upon arriving at my 650-square-foot suite in a mega-resort chichi casino I realized, what the hell was I thinking?

CES is so big that the vast Las Vegas Convention Center cannot handle it all. So many hotels, mine included, get in on the act. The day of the show started typically for me, with one notable exception, I have risen to the ranks of not having to arrive early to set up the booth while dodging fleets of forklifts.

First call was an 8am pre-show briefing in our office manager’s extra large suite (mine was just large). To save money after stowing us in expensive digs, a continental breakfast buffet was there to greet me. Normally I would be stocking up on a high-protein breakfast with large cups of coffee to start the day. Instead, I settled for white flour and sugar pastries and coffee served in beautiful but tiny little three-sip cups. I had to walk away from the briefing 12 times just to top off and I was still about six ounces shy of a proper large cup of joe. I realized then that I would have gladly traded the remote control drapery in my suite for a crappy little coffee maker found in far cheaper rooms. But for some reason, the more expensive the room, the less practical the amenity. I mean, $350 a night for a room and the coffee is extra? 

Next, I headed down to our booth with an armful of laptops and brochures. We were sharing space with a large successful computer company I will not name here because they’ll hate me for it. Let’s just call them Snull Machines, an entirely fictitious name (I hope).

Snull spent a load of money taking over a very upscale restaurant in my hotel to use as their booth. Being slightly off the beaten path of the main CES avenues, I though this was lame. But then the sommelier came by to recommend a champagne to go with the frittata gratis being served to all invited attendees and staff. At first I thought frittata gratis was some sort of goose liver and fennel egg dish popular here at Casino Chichi, turns out it means free egg casserole! It didn’t stop there. The eggs came with three kinds of breakfast meats, and six kinds of bread. Things were definitely (urp!) looking up.

While digesting my meal and stringing words together like “experience,” “compelling,” “innovative,” and “Vista” in a way that hopefully made sense, I smelled something. Usually when a smell wafts through your tradeshow booth it is a wholly unpleasant experience. But this was different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until a nice young woman who stood out because she was the only one in the entire mega-resort not sporting cleavage came by to ask if I was ready for my lobster bisque. I didn’t want to be the first person in the history of creamed seafood soups to answer in the negative, so I obliged demurely and told the blogger I was speaking to it was time for him to go preach to someone else about how Ubuntu should be the official OS of the Obama administration. The bisque was delightful, the cream was from Moroccan cows milked by silk-clad virgins whose skin has never experienced unfiltered sunlight. The lobsters were free-range and all under the age of six. My hostess recommended I save room for the main course, halibut encrusted salmon with wood-smoked asparagus wrapped in caramelized bunting. The bunting melted in my mouth, but left a piquant aftertaste. The asparagus was grand but hard to keep lit.

I knew then that if this culinary thrill ride keeps up, I would have a very hard time stringing marketing words together for the demos they brought me here to perform. Fortunately, just as my eyes started to roll towards the back of my head from all the cholesterol overwhelming my internal ecosystem, the master-barista came by with the casino’s Rolfer, who went to work breaking down my clogged chi and arteries. I took the barista’s recommendation of a coffee drink made from beans that passed through a spider monkey that had been consumed by an ocelot that lived its entire life in the canopy of a mahogany tree preserved just for this purpose. The coffee drink and Rolfing did the trick, but the coffee had a peculiar aroma, as if the spider monkey had had a cold or something.

After this, I remember talking to some more people about the product I was presenting, but that was interrupted by happy hour. As a musician, I consider myself a veteran happy-hour participant. I had spent entire summers living off of nothing but happy hour cuisine, right down to stuffing my pockets with jalapeño poppers and potato skins for the following morning’s breakfast. So imagine my surprise when not a single taquito, Cajun mini-pizza or chipotle smothered delicacy cruised by on a linen-lined tray. Rather than panic, I decided to try and figure out how many petite filet mignons it takes to equal the mass of a rib eye. Eleven. I had 14 but those last three seemed gratuitous.

By now, you may be wondering when I’ll get to my review of the best of the 2009 CES show. Well, unless touch-screen lawn chairs and soap dispensers do it for you, you just read it. Oh, and I should mention that flatscreen TVs are getting so thin they will soon be invisible to the naked eye. I predict this will be good for the economy as it will spawn an entirely new industry of weighty headgear that allows you to view your seven-micron thick widescreen television. For those of you staring at the wall because you lost your job and had to sell your TV, you’re way ahead of the curve!  

Next week’s column—dessert!

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