Debts to society and broken fingers

I am exhausted and beaten up.

Today, I had to get up very very early and travel to a regional trade show/recruiting event. This means frantic piling of most of my office into the back of the Bongo-Mobile and trying to figure out a yahoo map.

I got there on time and managed to snag a sweet parking spot. I had my choice of locations. This event was in a large outdoor venue. There was a building, but apparently the response for spaces was so great, they couldn't accommodate everyone indoors, so no one got to be in doors.

And, they had this wacky idea that the public might come if it were outdoors. A risk proposition, if you ask me.

I enjoy the opportunity to see what other groups do, steal ideas, and munch free food. The down side to these "open to the public" events is the greed that they inspire.

The way you attract the clueless human to your table is to have bright, glaring displays and free stuff they can snag. Some groups opt to supply plastic bags so that people might more effectively cart of loads of crap they don't want, need, or will ever look at again. I am pretty amazed that more often than not, I see other vendors jumping from table to table, snagging all the good stuff before the public even has a chance --- which totally defeats the purpose of trying to appeal to the public.

I saw vendors making off with multiple tote bags (from the one group dumb enough to spring for actual cloth tote bags) and was stuffing them with multiple plastic cups, pens, toothbrushes, candy, chip clips, etc. The doors were open to the public at 10 - and my entire stash of several hundred pencils were gone by 10:30. I would have lasted longer, but people wouldn't take just one -- they all had to take multiple pencils. When I would ask them to "please, just take one" they'd drop the half dozen they'd picked up and snag three. sigh.

But, as I was trying to appeal to the greedy underbelly of humanity, I was most grievously injured. Because we were out doors, it started to rain. Being that I was an early registrant, I was lucky enough to be under a shelter. One of my very good friends wasn't so lucky. Being a good and kind and decent monkey, I offered to retrieve the umbrella from my car for her use. While returning with the umbrella, I tripped over electrical wires and I think I've broken the knuckles in two fingers. I felt the fingers bend completely backwards when I fell. I also have really quite impressive road rash and bruises on both knees. I also scraped all the skin off my knuckles - and was leaving a trail of blood everywhere I went today.

As an old army colonel I know always says, no good deed goes unpunished.