Saturday, February 06, 2010

You can't keep me out.

So - last year Mr. and I went to this thing called the International Gift Fair in San Fransisco. It was okay. I mean it had some funny stuff like "Answer me Jesus", Life is Crap t-shirts, and Piperoid Characters.

It's one of those things that you can't really get into unless you are in the trade. Which I'm not. Not even close. But, somehow last year everyone was still in a daze from the economic meltdown, and they let me pay to get in.

This year, I thought I'd be able to do that again.

I walked up to the registration counter and asked to pay for two guest tickets. Which is 80 bucks. Oh no. This was not happening this year. No sliding under the table. No bribing the registrar. No way. No how. I could have paid them a thousand dollars, they weren't letting me in.

Or so they thought. I did manage to get in. I might have to crash the place next year - so, I'm not saying how. But, I got in for free.

Now, this all seems sort of silly to me. I was willing to pay the fee that they would charge for a guest of an exibitor, but they wouldn't let me. Somehow these people think that not allowing anyone outside of the trade, is going to keep out the looky loos. Which might be so. But, there is some dollar amount in which this is also successful. The stuff isn't that great that people are going to spend 80 bucks to get in.

Honestly, that is about my limit for something I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy. Yet, they totally lost out on the revenue, and I managed to get in anyway. This did mean I wasn't able to get any shots, but honestly - I'm not sure if I would have gotten any shots anyway. I tested the water a couple of times and got really suspicious replies. So I didn't try any further. It's a really weird protective trade group. There are high tech companies with less fear of espionage. Seriously.

There was only one thing I thought was mildly interesting were these things called Splats. Which I got sort of a crappy video of with my new flip camera. Did you know those things are the size of a cell phone! If I wasn't trying to get video on the down low, it would have been better. Website here. Their youtube vid here.



That woman with the Fran Drescher laugh is not me.

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