Earlier today, it was just as the tattooed, heavily muscled guys on giant golden tricycles rode by on Madison Avenue, that I realized mangy Chewbacca and Iron Man weren’t there with Boba Fett. It was coincidental that they were at 34th and Madison at the same time.
They also weren’t there to watch the Mexico Day Parade. Neither was I. I was on the way to City Crab for lunch. As the parade passed by, however, I flashed back to a surreal night in 1994, at the beginning of my three-year adventure living in Mexico City half-time while opening and running our company’s branch there.
My first trade show in Mexico City was in the new World Trade Center Mexico, a building the construction of which started in 1966, as the Hotel Mexico for the 1968 Olympics. As things sometimes go in Mexico, construction was completed on the opening morning of my trade show. Yes, we were the first trade show in the World Trade Center exhibition facility.
Which wasn’t quite finished yet.
We had worked it out for President Zedillo to visit, and offer inaugural remarks on the occasion of both our event, and the opening of the long-awaited building.
Three days prior to opening day, the place was a mess of cement dust, unfinished construction and details that had been forgotten in the planning of the building. For example, there was nowhere for trucks to wait to get into the loading dock, which had precious few bays. So they blocked busy streets on two sides.
Every hallway was filled with scaffolding, as workers completed the facility. Not a drop of paint or scrap of carpet had been applied. The owner, a new friend named Juan Diego Gutierrez told us there were 2,000 workers on 24-hour shifts to finish the building. He seemed unconcerned.
Meanwhile, I walked the halls and watched 50,000 square feet of trade show booths, 150 exhibitors moving in, unloading, being installed, in the midst of a dust cloud.
During a pizza party for the staff setting up the Volkswagen GEDAS booth, something was dripping from the ceiling into their booth. Turned out it was a leaky pipe in the bathroom on the floor above.
The epic stage backdrop we had built for keynote speeches in one of the secondary halls, crashed to the floor when a roll-up door was opened during a storm that passed through two days before the event. (It was completely re-built overnight using scrap wood from the construction site for the office tower).
A speaker from the executive suite of IBM couldn’t make the remote work for his presentation, so one of the guys duct taped a light switch to the podium and ran a naked wire across the platform backstage, where it met a battery and a light bulb. Upon turning on the light switch, a stage hand would change the slide.
My throat was caked with dust, and head pounding from the dirty air, noise and lack of sleep. On the evening of the day before the day before the event, I stepped out into the polluted city air.
My driver was nowhere to be found. I hailed a cab. Then promptly fell into a miserable sleep in the back of the little green VW Bug. 45 minutes later, I woke up and realized the driver had decided to run up the fare, as I was in a different part of town, and definitely not at my apartment, 15 minutes from the building. I directed him home. He didn’t get a tip.
24-hours until show time, a stream of military trucks pulled into the loading dock, pouring out what seemed a legion of troops in full bivouac gear, along with a squad of bomb-sniffing dogs. They would be with us until the president left.
Fully armed, they set up camp in an empty hall. They roamed the facility in battle dress, dogs sniffing, checking every truck that entered the docks, poking in every corner of the building., occasionally stopping people and questioning them.
Did I mention I don’t speak Spanish?
A man was in the upstairs hall, pounding out extra drips of dried concrete with a metal pole. The ping was audible above the din during the lulls in activity.
They had forgotten to mark the bank of light switches in the building. There were a lot of them. For two hours, one guy would hit a switch while another guy far away would at the top of his lungs yell “SI” or “NO” to indicate whether the guy had the right switch selection. Lights blinked on and off throughout the entire facility.
I’ve never been an operations person, but this was definitely not how things were supposed to work. It wasn’t my first show, but it sure felt like it.
Over and over, I called Juan Diego’s chief of staff. I called Gabriel, the guy who ran the building. I called Jorge, my producer. I called John, our good friend the from the show services firm, who we had brought down with us. The Mexican contacts were unconcerned. John, being the most unflappable person I knew, seemed about to flap, but that was evidenced by an “I don’t know.” And a shrug.
About 2 am, the night before the show, which opened at 2 pm the next day, I found a comfy corner upstairs in the empty, unfinished exhibition hall that we were not using. My own 80,000 square foot bedroom. I sat against the wall and fell asleep to the sound of, saws whirring, pole pounding, dogs barking, workers yelling, dust flying. At least they weren’t testing lights anymore, so it was pitch black.
An odd silence woke me up about 8 am. I got up, dusted myself off and stumbled to the elevator. When the elevator door opened downstairs, the dust was no longer flying. Sun filtered through the grime still hanging in the air, and I smelled fresh paint. I stepped out onto newly-laid carpet. Looking to my right, I saw a guy vacuuming (of course, there was no plug on the vacuum, he had just put the two wires in the outlet). He looked up and smiled.
The walls were brightly colored pink and yellow. Freshly painted. The scaffoldings were being pulled down. I walked through the exhibit hall, where set-up was winding down. There were still soldiers there, but there were also cleaning people getting the hall ready for the opening.
The keynote room was finished, chairs straight, stage set, a test pattern on the two massive screens. Even the signs and entry arch were just right.
I realized I needed to get home, shower and change, because there was going to be a show after all.
Which came off with very little stress the entire three days.
Boba Fett had walked behind me for a few blocks, then turned. I was getting ready to cross the street at the end of the parade, where a truck full of speakers, blaring mariachi tunes was turning.
Viva Mexico.
