...on the back of a tow truck.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
I like the Portland
In advance of next week's big industry trade show, a small away team from the Marketing Mothership made a trip up to Portland, Ore. to check out our just-completed new booth.
"Booth" is a funny thing to call it if you ask me...when I think of booths, I think greasy spoon restaraunts, or hard-to-close glass boxes with telephones in them, or the place where you confess your sins to the good father, or that seedy little shithole in San Francisco where Chuck took me to see the girls spank each other--a booth whose walls you dare not touch and whose floor makes you consider burning your shoes. No, a booth it is not.
Neither is it a "stand" as the english like to call it. A stand is a little kiosk where you buy flowers or newspapers or hotdogs. Though I like the lot of those things, we sell none--we sell helmets. And who ever heard of a helmet stand? So a stand won't stand either.
Truth to tell this new canvass of marketing our wares is kind of stadium-looking, though that would be overstating it. And besides there's no grandstands, which I would think is a prerequisite, so stadium won't do either. I think I'll just go kinda Children's Museum on it and call it a "Helmetorium." And it is so.
All that aside, the gist of this rant is that it was a good day with a good vibe in a nice place with nice people. Which is to say it was an exceptional work day.
An early rise and on the first flight we were on the way to Portland. It was actually only my third time to PDX, the first being oh 10-12 years ago when my best friend Dan lived there. I went on New Year's holiday and it was rainy and grey but I remember doing a nice hike and a run in the mountains and watching Beavis and Butthead until we were numb.
The next time Dan was getting married and that was fun and we ate a restaraunt under a bridge called Montage where they made funny animals out of the tin foil they wrapped our leftovers in. The servers were somehow surly but nice and unpretentious...and they served Rainer beer as if it were Dom Perignon.
So this time was for work, but the folks who built our helmetarium feel like friends more than vendors and I like that, so it fells less like work work. They're laid-back and treat us as nicely as they do Sony, their biggest client, who last time I went to E3 had a $50 million booth just for Playstation 2 (see Captain Mullet above).
In any case, the ride from the airport to suburban Hillsboro reminded me how beautiful Portland is. For some reason everything I saw was exciting and intriguing--bikes everywhere, people paddling kayaks everywhere, bridges sprawling majestically everywhere... even the used office furniture stores that were everywhere held some inordinate allure. I so wanted to check out this funky optical shop that looked like they had some awesome frames...to top it off, their bike rack that was shaped like a giant pair of horn rimmed glasses! And did I mention the bungalows? It was just one of those days.
Arriving at the office we were not surprised that our helmetorium looks amazing. Though some $49.99 million less than the Playstation booth, I still think it looks like a million bucks. Or it will. It was partially assembled to give us the look-and-feel and to iron out a few last details. It needs to be in Vegas on Saturday, so they were literally taking sections apart and packing them minutes after we examined them.
Late in the afternoon we whisked back to the airport only find out that our flight had been delayed. After catching up on emails and phone calls, we wandered a bit and found this awesome Lego display and went forth quickly to creating a Cubist interpretation of Portland's bridges (again, photos above).
I think the children in the airport were frightened by our determined and frenzied pace as they dare not approach the playspace--though, truthfully, we would not have dissuaded them. We were all just kids for a while and duly dissapointed when our flight was finally called.
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