Tradeshow Floor: A Great Emptiness

I don’t know where the 10,000 attendees at RIM’s annual conference were on Tuesday afternoon, but they certainly weren’t on the exhibition floor.

Innumerable bowls of chocolate remained uneaten, promotional personal battery operated fans and other show floor free booty remained unused, and sales people and other company representatives seemed to be huddled in nervous clutches, like Emperor penguins who just got wind that there might be a leopard seal prowling in their midst.

At one end of the exhibition space, at the dozens of tables set aside for insurance buyers and sellers to eat their conference floor lunches, lone wolves in rumpled shirts sat one to a table, staring at the anti-social screens of their laptop computers.

At the other end, those lunch tables were slightly more populated, but in between it was a grisly scene. There were so many sales people standing around with nothing to do that a passerby had to avert their gaze, more out of compassion than anything.

Now and then one of the more aggressive booth workers would lurch out at a pedestrian, coming on like a barker trying to lure a drunken sailor into a peepshow, but they quickly got the message. There are so many of you, and there is only one of me, and I’m afraid you’re going to rend my garments in your desperation.

One service provider reported that foot traffic as of mid-afternoon on Tuesday was off more than 90 percent from the previous day.

So where was everyone? Were they all sitting raptly in RIMS sessions? Had Tuesday’s more humane temperatures lured them out onto the region’s beaches and golf courses?

No one was sure. All they knew was that it was slow, painfully slow, in the exhibition space on Tuesday afternoon.