Chicago: Two for the Show

The day was characterized by wrong things going right.

I had the hotel call a taxi. They said it would be a black car. We stood outside and a big gray Lincoln pulled up. The driver was a small man with a Russian accent and unaccountably apologetic in demeanor. He ran inside, then back out, asking if we were going to McCormick Place. I said we were and he loaded my case into the trunk. As we got in I saw him go back to the hotel entrance and meet one of the clerks. He passed her something, she smiled secretly and glanced in our direction, he got behind the wheel, vaguely apologizing again, and off we went.

I noticed the car didn’t have a meter. It had no markings either. Nothing whatsoever that suggested it was a real taxicab.

But my contact reached me via cell phone and we struggled through his Italian accent and uncertain grasp of English to establish that I was on the way and sure enough, after twenty or thirty minutes, the driver pulled up to the Hyatt at McCormick and said it was fifty five bucks. I figured it would be about that and gave him sixty and he handed me a blank receipt to fill out myself, and disappeared into the hazy Illinois sunshine. We met Marco in the lobby and went around to the convention side of things.

It was a great cavernous space in the throes of chaos, shipping crates and ladders and packing materials flying everywhere. A week-long exhibition was to start the next day, countless companies from around the world peddling machines, software, supplies and services to the clinicians and hospitals who use them. A thousand shows were to happen all at once, a thousand demonstrations, a thousand sales pitches. This room the size of Soldier Field was being turned into a movie set without cameras, a thousand stages being built all at once.

I carried a Pelican case heavy with tools and spare parts. In Oregon a few weeks before I had helped build the prototypes, and when I heard they were shipping from there to Italy and then back to Chicago, I couldn’t believe that after all that they wouldn’t need fixing. They were just too fragile. I then made the mistake of saying so in a status email. The division head of engineering read that and asked everyone in the distribution list, so, who’s going to Chicago? Me and my big mouth. But there ain’t no one but me really knows how to work on the things.

We followed Marco through a sea of half-built booths where engineers hunched at screens under the ladders to get their demonstrations working and met the rest of the gang from the company I was working with, a very friendly and overworked collection of engineers and managers and marketing types dashing about to get banners hung and networks strung and make sure everything they shipped was brung. My task was very simple: Unpack the prototypes and see that they worked. If they didn’t, then I needed to set up a workspace in the midst of all the activity and totally rebuild them as needed. Since I would normally need a six-foot-long table and bright lighting for that and all I had was floor, I felt a certain relief when I powered them up and, without complaint, they indeed powered up and booted and did what they were asked.

I still had software to install so I pulled out a USB thumb-drive and did that. This was a good thing, because the task further exercised the machines and they didn’t fail. I’ve been in the biz long enough to know that every five minutes a machine works properly accomplishes two things. Yes, it brings the machine five minutes closer to failure. But it also takes the machine five minutes further beyond its threshold of infant mortality. The location of that threshold is never known, but every new machine has one, and the longer the machine runs, the more likely it will continue to run, at least for awhile. These machines didn’t need to last forever. They only needed to last a week. More precisely, they only needed to last until I was on the plane back home, and that they did.

Mission accomplished, we took our leave to go and explore the city. I listened all the day long for the cell phone to go off. The prototypes looked great but inside they were a rat’s nest of wires and used circuit boards and tape and glue and just one good drop from some ham-handed CEO’s grip to the convention center’s hard concrete floor would have me scurrying back for an operation that could last well into the night. But the phone never rang. It was a good day.

The show was RSNA 2006. None of the pictures below show or indicate who I was working with. Marco's name was changed from his real name, even though it was equally innocuous.