home, sweet internet

i'm back! online anyway. phew. i hate being disconnected. i needed to vent so bad yesterday and it was so hard not having a computer to write all my frustration into. i finally broke down and wrote on a pen and paper but ended up feeling like i was writing a suicide note or something. pen and looseleaf paper journaling is weird.

yow yesterday was crazy. finally at about 4pm my booth construction was almost done. the booth was shaped kind of like an X with 4 big graphic panels on top of a metal structure; and then there was a 5th big panel stacked right in the center of the X. so that the overall height of the booth was about 16 feet or so. It was actually taller than 16 feet and they were removing some parts on the bottom that weren't supposed to be there to actually make it 16 feet to meet the show's regulations. Anyway, they used a forklift to tilt the booth up a bit so they could work on two of the sides at once. That worked fine. But when they went to set it back down the forklift driver raised it. Really fast. I think it must've gone another 8 feet or so off the ground at an angle and then it collapsed on itself and crumbled (crashing into neighboring booths in the process). It all happened really fast. I remember watching a couple crew members trying to grab the two sides that were going up in the air and use their body weight to pull it back down. But it kept going higher and they couldn't. I was standing on the opposite side mostly out of the way. But when it fell I couldn't get completely out of the way in time and part of it hit my arm. It's funny cause the booth looks nice and lightweight. But it's not! Anyway, I'm not hurt. I just got a big bruise on my arm. The guys got on their cellphones right away (noone said anything to me) and I went out to try to calm down. I knew the structure was ruined. And there wasn't anyone around that could speak English. I was supposed to have the booth completely done by 8pm last night. I knew I was screwed. After making a few phone calls to Jeff & my boss to whine about the situation I was in, I went back in and found the person from the construction company who spoke a little bit of English. While I was out (about 10 minutes) a crew of about 15 people had shown up and started trying to straighten the booth out. It was mangled and warped. There were holes in at least one of the fabric panels. There was no way it was going to go back together again. Luckily, I'd planned to reuse part of the structure in future shows in a totally different configuration. So instead of my big, tall structure. I ended up with three images along the back wall of a huge space. (lots of picture drawing, gesturing, charade-ing to explain that to them. i tried to show them pictures on my laptop and then found out the monitor had been smashed during the crash.) The show organizers came over to check on me and were really helpful. I had to order a bunch of new furniture to fill up the space...but they couldn't deliver it last night. I ended up getting it this morning at 9am (the show floor opened at 10am) so I had to unpack and organize stuff in a rush this morning. Definitely the worst show/work experience ev-er. And I was so tired it really amplified everything for me. I still only managed to sleep four hours last night. All of my coworkers had been at a work meeting and dinner so they didn't get back till late. Turned out they'd had a terrific day. Apparently they went to the head of a partner company's house for dinner. And had the most amazing Korean dinner they'd ever experienced. They can't stop talking about it. Grrr.

The company that broke everything said they're going to pay for stuff. And pay for a new laptop for me. They tried to give me a loaner one last night but they gave me a Korean version so I couldn't do anything on it. My dad had a brilliant idea to just get a monitor and try hooking that up to my laptop. I tried getting one from the hotel last night but they didn't have any and had already loaned out their laptop. But this afternoon, the company that broke everything brought me a monitor. And now I can get back online. Yay yay yay.