Bob Cramer's Blog

Perhaps after nearly 40 years in business, my professional calling has been realized.  While I know that I’m supposed to be on the senior tour by now and do honestly excel at holding the door for people (“finally found a job I’m good at”), it is in the cavernous and artificial confines of exhibition halls where all of my skills come together in a master souffle of salesmanship, comedy and Fitbit-obsessed step counting. I am a Trade Show Dude.

A professional gets paid to do his craft and I receive a check for traveling the country selling my wares, following in the glorious footsteps of snake-oil salesmen from a bygone era. Decked out in a company-supplied uniform (Ok, only the shirt and not the Tommy Johns), I take refuge with the security guards and the generally young people whose job it is to “man the booth”.  Whether a 10’ by 10’ or 20’ by 20’, this glorified patch of space usually padded with over-plush carpet is my Fenway Parkway, my Augusta National, my Cathedral.  Shrouded in bright florescent lights with the booth pews lined in perfect formation awaiting the trade show faithful, the exhibit hall is my canvas and I am it’s Rembrandt.

Don’t let anybody tell you it is easy work doing booth duty. You must bring your A game at all times, always have a clever line or two up your sleeve (“accelerating revenues this way, declining revenues over there”) and never get too engrossed in any particular conversation as you might miss somebody important walking by.  You need good eyes so you can carefully pick out the company names of harried attendees and not waste precious words on conference personnel.   Multi-tasking and good aerobic skills are also a prerequisite because at times, you must dodge people who haven’t had a meal since breakfast making a beeline for lunch while trying to scan somebody’s badge and not touch, prod or poke too near, um, their privacy.

I have been injured on the job both mentally and physically. One time somebody did not stop when I tried to talked to them and it hurt my pride.  Another time a shelf collapsed on my foot at the Oracle conference.  Let’s just say that Larry Ellison and I now both own a decent size stake in the company.

Being a professional Trade Show Dude has it perks.  I got to visit the exact same hotel in Las Vegas twice in a two-week period.  I just left my suitcase, had them clean my stuff and put it right back in my fancy suite at the MGM Grand.  I wish. The Opryland Hotel in Nashville also made an impression if you want to remain in a enclosed bubble while working a trade show bubble.

Trade shows are great for making new friends, and I have become a bit of a regular and a minor celebrity on the B2B marketing circuit.  There are times when I have even tutored young people from other companies on how to work the trade show floor.  I know they appreciate the advice from the stiff, gray-haired guy with the Ray Romano voice showing them the ropes.  They have even offered to buy me a free drink or give me promotional sunglasses so I would go away quietly.

But one guy I met on the circuit didn’t have such an opportunity.  I met him while working out one afternoon during a lull in the trade show action.  Just me and him and handful of others.  He was on the stairmaster.  So I went on the stairmaster.  When he went on the treadmill,  I went on the treadmill. Yes, I was stalking him and finally got the courage up to introduce myself.  I asked him a question about his Keynote speech that morning and now the Co-CEO of Oracle and I exchange emails.

Such is the life of the Trade Show Dude.

I chipped my front tooth playing tennis the other night.  Yup, trying to gallantly hit a reflex volley, your athletic blogger missed the ball completely but connected directly with teeth formerly known as pearly whites, sprinkling tooth fairy dust all over Court 1 at my fancy schmancy country club in the heart of Buckhead.

For the next 48 hours, everyone I encountered was treated to a close up view of my chipped tooth.  In fact, I used the word, “chipped”, so many times that it has became an obsession, as if everywhere I look, chips are taking over.  So here I go:

On TV, I hear about Chipper Jones and Chipotle;  At Holiday parties, chips galore.  I don’t have a chip on my shoulder, but in business, owning blue chip stocks, using bargaining chips and taking some chips of the table could make rich;   At my fancy schmancy club, the reigning tennis champ is named Chip;  “Chip and charge” might work at tennis, but chipping is my achilles heal at golf.  I’d be honored to be called a “chip off the old block”. Chips Ahoy, anybody? (Not sure where the Chippendales fit in all of this).

Now that I have that out of my system, one guy not phased by all this chippiness is my rock solid Dentist, who in less than an hour restored my smile to its original off-white glamour, thankfully.

Looking ahead to Christmas, I wonder what Santa has in store for me.  In past years, when I haven’t blogged enough or wrote badly, lumps of coal were my usual gift (I have stockpiled them waiting for coal prices to recover but that is another story).  As I have been a bit better this year,  when I sit on Santa’s knee in the next few days,  I might have to ask for a little more to compensate for the recent tooth trauma and being such a good sport during the recovery.  You guessed it:  a bag of wood chips might be in order.

(Blogger’s note: since my viewership is growing so rapidly, I have resorted to reposting, based on current events, some previous work that you and my handful of other loyal readers might have missed. The following was originally published in November, 2012. Enjoy!)

Finishing, “A Walk in the Woods”, Bill Bryson’s personal tale of tackling the Appalachian Trail (AT), made me think of some of my own outdoor adventures. Fortunately, these memories were brief and relatively benign as I don’t like to sleep in the woods that much, have trouble setting up even today’s idiot proof tents, and never carried a backpack filled with gear for any distance longer than walking to a Chastain concert.

The allure of dropping everything and hiking the AT does have some romantic quality to it, and the fact I live in Georgia and have seen Springer Mountain, the AT’s south-to-north starting point, makes it even a real possibility. The counter-balance to this fantasy is that I can’t spell REI and as a kid, I saw the movie “Deliverance”. That by itself is a good reason to never set foot in North Georgia.

But North Georgia has come a long way and if you can somehow avoid all of the bikers, there are some beautiful sections including Big Canoe, where I once had a house, and the Chestatee River, where I once worked up the courage to go on an overnight “camping with canoeing included” excursion with my daughter and a raft of other fathers and daughters. (I was the trip’s scribe and wrote a humorist, say I, essay on this experience before blogs were prevalent and email was my only distribution).

While my recent outdoor creds have been gained near the southern start of the AT, I actually earned my true camp badges in ropes, forestry, first aid and acting like a big baby deep in the Maine woods near the Trails finish line. Please note I scaled Mt. Katahdin as a 12 year old, survived Black Sandy Island as a 9 year old, and ate all the lobster on the field trip to Boothbay Harbor (that doesn’t count). Somewhere during those years I also made my first movement au natural, with no splash, no toilet paper and no real interest in having to do that on a regular basis.

I also recall that I went on a teen tour one summer which involved six weeks of camping. We stayed occasionally at the KOA campgrounds, the Ritz Carleton of outdoor living, many featuring pools, showers, real bathrooms and well stocked vending machines. I can’t for the life of me remember what our tents looked like, but I vividly remember the cute 16 year old girls from Long Island and winning the glazed donut eating contest.

Now my step brother, Peter, well, he is a woodsman extradonaire. He actually hiked most of the 3,100 mile Continental Divide Trail (CDT) from Mexico to Canada one summer with his friend, Mike. In terms of stature, I’d say the CDT trumps just about anything in “Get Off The Couch And Turn Off The Electronics” summer activity category. While they certainly deserve all the credit, praise, recognition and adulation for their accomplishment, it took a village to get Peter and Mike across the proverbial hydrological land hump and every family member had a role to play, from the timely shipping of care packages to remote locations to logistic details only us little people cared about.

My job was in post-trip publicity where I pulled some strings with my employer to actually get them on national television (thank you). In my high powered assistant assignment editor position at the then fledgling CNN network (it was only a few years old at that point), I worked my magic to pull together a 90 second masterpiece focused on Peter and the stray dog he picked up on his journey.

As you see, the dog, named Mange, had to make the radical adjustment from wondering freely in the wild mountains of the West to navigate apartment living in NYC’s urban jungle, where dogs in the winter wear coats and their owners need to pick up after them. We found a dog psychiatrist, (yes, they have those), to evaluate Mange’s condition and after immediately prescribing Xanax, he pronounced Mange as well adjusted as any other NYC resident.

Our Peter and pet centered funny, touching, still picture-filled news piece ran on a slow news day one early afternoon and all was good until the phone call from Ed Turner, the big cheese those days at CNN Atlanta headquarters (and no relation to the super big cheese Ted either). He threatened all of us with our jobs if that story ever ran again, and so ended Mange’s media career.

As I look to the future, I don’t see a mid-life crisis Appalachian Trail hike in the cards, but I am interested in more outdoor adventures. The notion of walking on a trail carrying a pack, one foot in front of the next, seems like good clean fun, sort of like carrying your golf clubs. Physically, I’m up for it, and if I can avoid poison ivy, learn to hang my food, read a trail map and keep a good positive attitude even if it rains (“the more miserable, the more memorable”), I have some potential. Maybe I can bring my iPhone along for the ride, crank up some Peter Tosh and Mick Jagger singing, “Just keeping on walking, don’t look back” and who knows where I’ll go.

I bought my dog a condo last week.  Yes, I know, but it comes on the strong recommendation of his therapist and it is supposed to ease anxiety and create a happy place.  With interest rates starting to tick up and rental housing rates out of this world, I decided it was time for my precious canine to have a place of his own especially now that he is in his 20’s in dog years and needs some independence.

We furnished his new digs in style.  The plush white carpet is to die for and we mounted an iPad on one of the screen walls complete with WiFi.  No dog worth his salt would be caught without an Over-The-Top video stream platform so we too subscribed to PetFlix.   I warned Gap, my dog, not to binge watch and that two hours of the Lassie Channel was it.

Now that Gap has his own place, I worry things are going to change.  I came over to watch the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, and I know he idolizes American Pharoah.  Being three himself, I told him that not every three-year old gets to eat and roll around in the hay for a living and that life was unfair.

So Gap is out looking for his first job, but he has a temper when around new people so the hospitality industry is out. As he has some German and Shepherd in him, I suggested cars or farming as possibilities.   He said he was thinking about going back to graduate school, just what I needed to hear.

For now, though, the new condo has a dog run, a dog park, a dog hair salon and doggone it, maid service.  Next thing he is going to ask for is an Uber account.

Ski season is in full bustle and if they only had lifts and slightly more elevation, some of the best conditions today might be New York City’s Central Park or Boston’s Bunker Hill. But with all of the white stuff aflitter, my recent two-day ski pilgrimage to Park City once again reminded me of the dark side of the downhill, the dredged ski boot.

In the ol’ memory bank, I had put the entire “getting ready for skiing” thing out of mind and kept my recollections to “Bogue Miller” Bob bombing down the groomed blue diamond slopes decked out in 1980’s ski fashion with no GoPro on my helmet and slightly too small goggles completing the total dork look. But only after my friend casually told me that he hurt his back putting on his boots did I flashback to the Breeze Ski and Snowboard rental shop where just days ago I too experienced the agony and then the pleasure, the in and then out, of the proverbial ski boot.

For the first skiing day, I wore my best Thorlo socks, hitched them up with no wrinkles, made sure nothing was caught inside and bravely tried to slip my big sized 10 feet into a size 10 boot. The nice young man at the shop reminded me that I should pull the tongue all the way out of its enclosed plastic shell which I eventually did, only to be faced with biometrically impossible task of tightening the buckles. I could see the boots, but I couldn’t touch them, and I do yoga (see “Locked In Concrete”).

So when all else failed and I could not contort myself like a pretzel without pulling something, I started to beg and threaten. I begged the nice young man to help tighten me down. When he got distracted, I threaten my son, promising to keep him out of the will if he didn’t get right over and help his old man out. A few years ago in Steamboat Springs, I swear that I had an Olympic downhill medal winner help boot me up. Yes, Hilary, it does take a village.

During the process, I became a bit jealous of the snowboarders. Their shoes seem comfortable and warm. I also thought about the ski boot’s first cousin, the bowling shoe. Despite the smell and the somewhat repulsive thought of who else has worn these things, at least they have laces and are, at times, even fashionable (speaking of repulsive thoughts, have you thought about how many people stand on the exact same spot going through security, those two feet painted on the floor, many barefoot, hour upon hour, day after day? But I digress).

Anyway, after two full day on the slopes, mostly eating in the overpriced but strategically located Mid-Mountain Lodges where they seem to put the bathrooms in the hardest place to navigate wearing ski boots, I was more than happy to say good-bye to my Salomon’s and seriously consider cross country or just getting massages on my next ski outing.