Scoundrels

L.A. Trade Show journal #6
Back home · Thu, 18 Sep 2025. 1pm

Today has been a story about "early". In some ways that's been good, in some ways it's been bad.

One of the bad parts is that I was up early. I woke up before 4am feeling a bit ill. I tossed and turned for an hour but couldn't get back to sleep. Laying down wasn't making me feel better so I sat up with my computer. It was just as well I was up early because I had two early meetings to join. By the time I left the hotel to head to the airport I'd already put in 2 hours of work.

By the time I hopped into a Lyft to the airport I was feeling better... enough. Better enough not to get sick in the car. 😣

I got to BUR airport with enough time to spare. Enough time to get breakfast or an early lunch, even. Except at BUR there's, like, one restaurant in the terminal, and it is stupid expensive. They were serving breakfast only, no lunch, and just a bagel was $25. Granted, the bagel was loaded. It came with smoked salmon. But still, $25 for a bagel?!?!



If they had bananas there I'll bet they would've been $10.

I grabbed a seat in my gate area and waited. I've remarked before that BUR is a small airport. And bare-bones. Today I was boarding at Gate 2. That means from security I had to walk past... Gate 1... to get there. Oh, but the $25 bagel restaurant was across from Gate 3. So I had to walk up there and back on my unsuccessful food foray. 😅

I just kind of vegged in my seat at the airport. I read some news, answered a few Slack and email messages from colleagues, stared out the ground-floor windows at the mountains in the distance, and mostly tried not to think about whether my bowels were still hurting. Eventually it was time to line up and board.

Boarding the flight was a no-nonsense thing today. There were no pre-boards. And with only 80-some passengers we all got boarded in less than 15 minutes.

Boarding quickly meant the flight was able to depart a few minutes ahead of time. In addition to the time savings there we also experienced no delays in flight. It's only 48 minutes from wheels-up at BUR to touchdown at SJC... even though the scheduled gate-to-gate time is usually 75 minutes.

I was surprised when, 35 minutes before our schedule landing, the pilot announced over the intercom, "We're on final approach to SJC". I looked out the window to see where we actually were, as I recognize many of the landmarks on the NorCal <--> SoCal route since I fly it so often....



Yup, I recognized the outskirts of San Jose below us. And I saw pigs flying, since this Southwest flight was not only not arrive late but actually arriving early! 🤣

Landing almost 30 minutes early was cool with me as there were no constraints on the rest of my schedule. I had parked at the airport in the daily lot, so once I de-planed and exited the terminal it was only a 5 minute walk to my car. Most of that 5 minutes was because I had to park on pretty much the far side of the lot, all the closer spaces having been full when I arrived on Tuesday.

By 12 noon I was already sitting down for lunch at one of my favorite spots in Sunnyvale. By 12:45pm I was home and unpacking my suitcase. Now it's 1pm and I aim to get some more work done today from my home office... though I'm already tired after such an earlier start to the day I'm unsure how much more work I'm good for.

L.A. Trade Show journal #4
At the show · Wed, 17 Sep 2025. 5:30pm

Today has been the trade show. AWS Summit - Los Angeles. The show's now winding down for the day. People started disappearing around 3pm, presumably to try to beat the traffic home, though the show formally goes through 6pm. This has been my first chance today to catch my breath.

I only got to the show just after 10am. I was busy with other tasks, time-sensitive ones, working in my tiny hotel room on the children's chair at my combination nightstand/desk. I had intended to get to the show at 9 but that didn't work out. So at about 9:55 I zipped up my bag, rode the elevator down to the ground floor, and... walked across the street.



That's right, my morning commute today was a walk across the street. Okay, it was kind of a walk across two streets because I had to get to the diagonally opposite corner. 🤣 This is the entire reason why I booked that tiny hotel room knowing it was tiny— and paid a pretty penny for it. Because it's Right. Here.

Minutes later I'd picked up my badge and registration and was ready to hit the show floor.



Traffic at our booth was steady across the day. That was frankly a relief— from a value-for-our-dollar perspective— from last week's trade show, where we had stretches of an hour or more with no meaningful conversations in the booth.

Things did get busy for me in the middle of the afternoon when I had three scheduled demos in a row with different customers. One brought a group of 9-10 people, ranging from devops engineers to a devops lead, to a manager and a VP. And they kept me busy, firing tough questions at me from all sides. I think I did pretty well, though. I look forward to us moving to the next stage with them.

Throughout the day I also saw, and chatted with, a few customers I've been working with for years. It was great to see them "in 3D" again... especially because some of them I've been working with for over 4 years and don't think I've ever met f2f. Plus a few people who stopped by the booth recognized me from portraying Jenkins at the other trade show last week even though I was "Clark Kenting it" today.

Well, the show's winding down now, but the day's not over. My company is sponsoring an after-hours reception at a bar a few blocks away. "Grab a drink and some snacks with us and wait for the traffic to die down before going home," we've been encouraging people all day.

It's a nifty way of framing the event. I don't know, though, how much of a turnout we'll get. Many people have already left to beat the traffic. And I don't blame them. I know if I were on the other side of the table today, I'd value getting home by 5pm to have dinner with my family over having a free drink of two on some company's dime and then getting home at 8:30.

L.A. Trade Show journal #2
Burbank · Tue, 16 Sep 2025. 7:30pm

My flight down to LA this afternoon was uneventful. We did leave late as I predicted. It's funny how I can look at a few simple facts in the public record and predict such things with more accuracy— or perhaps more honesty— than the airline itself. Anyway, once we started taxiing I nodded off to sleep and then slept for most of the flight. That was surprising as I never used to be able to sleep, at all, while flying, let alone on a flight in the middle of the afternoon.

Landing at Burbank airport instead of LAX provided exactly what I expected it to. I mean, aside from the novelty of exiting the plane onto the tarmac. And enjoying a beautiful, mostly not-smoggy view of the San Gabriel Mountains just north of us as I did so. Tiny, outdated, hole-in-the-wall Burbank airport is fast. I walked into the terminal at gate three and didn't have far to go to get out to the curb to catch an Uber.

My first stop this evening has not been my hotel downtown but rather dinner with a colleague, Sandi. She suggested Smoke House in Burbank. It was a short ride from the airport— though with afternoon traffic and surge pricing the fare was almost $40. 🥵 (Sandi later said she could've picked me up on her drive over there. I told her I could've tipped her $40. 🤣)

I'd looked up the Smoke House online when Sandi suggested it last week. From their website it looks like a modern, concept oriented restaurant. Y'know, the kind of place that serves a messy food that used to be cheap— i.e., barbecue ribs— but does so in a pretentious, upscale environment with a bunch of microbrews on tap at the bar... and two-thirds of them are IPAs.

Well, I was wrong. Smoke House is not a 2020s era concept restaurant repackaging old fashioned food. It is a genuine old school steakhouse that's been there for decades. It's all 1950s inside, with dark wood paneling and overstuffed red vinyl booths. Black-and-white photos of movie stars and producers line the walls. This is a place where movers and shakers in film & TV have been coming to make deals over martinis for decades.

Was I impressed by any of that? No. But standing beneath a portrait of Walt Disney in one of his impeccably tailored dark suits starting glancing down at me with his typical half-sneer— I mean, he even had the courtesy to stub out his cigarette before this photo was taken— I did suddenly feel underdressed. As I arrived a few minutes before Sandi and had my suitcase with me I gave serious consideration to dodging into the men's room and changing from shorts and sandals into trousers, black leather shoes, and a sports coat.

Meeting at 4:30 for dinner was a bit early. Sandi and I agreed to go at a leisurely pace so we'd be hungry by the time our entrees arrived. We started with chatting up the waiter since the place was dead at 4:30, then had a couple of drinks, ordered a small appetizer to share, then finally our mains— we both chose the prime rib, though she wanted hers well done 😣 and settled for medium-well when the waiter politely told her "No" 🤣— and finally dessert.

It's weird going out to a restaurant with a woman who enjoys all the same stuff I do (except for that well-done nonsense) and can put it away. Man, if Sandi were younger, and we were both single, I might ask her out on a date. Except for that well-done nonsense. Red flag right there. 🤣

Hawk broke a toe bone in her foot. She stubbed her foot pretty hard against something in the house Sunday evening, and her little toe went one direction while the rest of the foot went the other.

"I think I broke my toe," she said, based on the pain.

"It doesn't look broken to me," I observed based on the lack of things dangling and odd angles and the minimal swelling. "Maybe you just stubbed it hard."

Nope. She broke it. That was determined conclusively this morning when she went for an x-ray at the urgent care clinic. She was already going there for a regular doctor appointment, and since it's a basically everything-in-one clinic her GP sent her downstairs to radiology after her regular appointment.

Fortunately the break is small. The bone is held in its (mostly) correct place by the soft tissue. She's going to hobble around for the next two days until an appointment with a trusted podiatrist, one we've both seen before for foot problems. In fact, this is the doctor I went to for a second opinion— a swiftly correct opinion, unlike previous doctors I'd seen—when I broke pretty much the same bone in my foot umpteen years ago.

Unfortunately the injury is big enough to jeopardize plans. For one, Hawk has foot surgery— for another foot problem—already scheduled in a few weeks. There's a chance this could force a delay in that. We'll know more when she sees the specialist on Wednesday. He's the one who's doing the surgery.

This broken toe also jeopardizes our weekend plans. We've got a trip to Phoenix planned, flying out there on Saturday and coming home Tuesday (two days off) to celebrate our anniversary. We booked 3 nights at resort hotels with splashy pools. We may still be able to use the splashy pools, albeit with minimal splashing, but this injury will cancel our additional plans to do some hiking in the desert as the summer heat gives way to high temperatures in the mere 90s.

Buzzfeed had a listicle in my newsfeed this evening, "People Who Work Night Shifts Are Sharing Things "Day Shifters" Don't Understand About Their World, And As A Day Shifter, I'm Intrigued". I'm a sucker for Buzzfeed listicles (lists of pithy responses in Reddit threads that are turned into articles) and I worked second shift for three summers years ago, so I figured, Hey, I'll play! Here are Five Things of mine:

1) Second Shift requires some adaptation. The second, or "swing", shifts I worked were 5pm-midnight, 5-11pm, or 4pm-midnight. The exact hours varied by job and year to year within one of the jobs (the company changed its hours). Working second shift puts you out of sync with the rest of society, though not as badly as third shift. That's because I could still manage daytime hours for appointments, shopping, etc... though it did take more careful planning and some adaptation. For example, if I wanted to go out for "dinner" at a restaurant, it was at 3:30pm before work. My effective dinner, after getting off work, was almost always some cooked straight out of the freezer at home at 1-2am. Virtually nothing was open after midnight, nor even really after 10pm, in the places I lived.

2) Second shift can be busy... or quiet. In one job I worked, a call center, the whole department was staffed during second shift, meaning there were a few dozen employees plus 2-3 managers. Second shift there entailed constant, steady work. Though the rest of the company was dark at those hours... so breaks in the lunch room or outside the front door were alwasy eerily quiet. At the other job I worked I was there as part of a 24x7 rotation in case something went wrong. And since I was the only person there for most of my shift, either it was something basic I could diagnose and repair on my own, or I documented and left it for the fully staffed M-F 8-5 crew.

3) You can't come home and go straight to bed. One of the biggest things people misunderstand about working second shift is thinking, "Oh, it's just 'til 11 or 12, that's like a slightly late evening." NO IT'S NOT! It's not "just like a slightly late evening" because when you get off shift and arrive home at midnight or almost 1am, you can't just go straight to bed. You're up. You've been working. You need a few hours to wind down before you can sleep! I was routinely going to bed at 3 in the morning. Sometimes, if I got involved in reading a book after work, I'd be up until 6am.

4) Switching shifts is hard. The third year I worked second shifts, I did that 3-4 nights a week and also had 1-2 days of first shift on the weekends. Switching 1st to 2nd wasn't hard, but going from 2nd to 1st always messed up my schedule. I'm glad I was young when I did that.

5) I was warned off working third shifts. Not that I ever considered shift work after summer jobs in college, but one of the third-shifters at the 24x7 place I worked was a quiet warning. There were two guys who worked the 11pm-9am shift, Ross and Gene. Ross had only been doing it for a year or two; he was hard up in a slow economy, and the work paid well. But Gene had always been working third shift. He looked to be 60... but one night during our shift overlap he and I were discussing his plan to go back to college to finish his degree, and I learned he was only 40. The man clearly looked 60! Everyone around the office whispered, "Yeah, you age fast working third shift!"

I did it. Tonight I finished the series Better Call Saul. Recall that I got up and walked away from it... four months ago now. And I was only 2 episodes from the end!

Yeah, the last several episodes of the series, which were a lengthy flash-forward to Saul's antics months after the finale of Breaking Bad, when he's in hiding in the midwest with a fake identity and worries his cover has been blown, became too tedious for me. I quit watching after two flash-forward episodes. But tonight I came back to finish them up.

Why? Why finish the series now? I think the main reason is I wanted it off my plate. I haven't watched anything else on streaming these past 4 months. I guess I've felt like this was in the way, unfinished, and that I couldn't move on to anything else until this was done. So tonight I decided to Git 'Er Done.

I'll write about the last two episodes soon. I'm putting this marker down right now, though, in case it turns out to be another gap of 4 months until I write. 😂 But I hope I'll get to it this weekend. Then I'll be free to go on and watch other stuff on the many streaming services we pay for again.

Napa Trade Show blog #8
Back home - Wed, 10 Sep 2025, 5:30pm.

I'm back home from the trade show in Napa. It's earlier than expected. Booth visits were slow again today, tapering off to nearly nil by 2pm, so our event coordinator encourage those of us not already booked to stay overnight to head home early. I left at 3, which was just an hour before the official closing time, and used that early start to mostly beat traffic on the way home. Still, there was some traffic, making it a 2 hour drive. I got home at 5pm. That's 48 hours + 3 hours after I left on Monday.

It's just as well most of us left early. Our team spirit was close to nil as we spent most of the day trying to figure out what's going on with a layoff today. Oh, we totally put on game faces for talking to customers and prospects. Selling was the one thing we all could be positive about. But the moment it was just us coworkers again, the dismal "WTF is going on?" discussions started back up.

Speaking of those dismal discussions, it looks like tomorrow morning is going to be back-to-back-to-back meetings with various levels of leadership "explaining" the layoffs to us. I quote explaining because do we really need 3 hours of meetings on the topic, with each layer of executive management needing to have their own say? That says to me we have too many layers of executives. Maybe they should have laid off one of them. But of course they didn't.

Napa Trade Show blog #6
Getting ready for Day 2 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025, 10am.

After staying up too late Monday night at the trade show then having to get up really early for a full day yesterday, I was careful last night to pace myself better. It wasn't so much that I made a mistake in pacing Monday night; I didn't. The problem was that I was already running at full speed when a bit of illness tripped me up for 4 hours. It reminded me that I need to under-schedule my day so that, if and when something goes wrong, there's spare time to devote to fixing it.

Thus last night I bowed out of the celebratory dinner, the post-dinner concert, and the post-post-dinner piss-up at the bar. Instead I went out for a quiet dinner offsite by myself, got back before 10pm, and was lights-out at 11pm. Then this morning I slept in until almost 8am. I was able to do that because I don't have any fixed responsibilities until the show at 11:30am. It felt so decadent getting 9 hours of sleep while at a trade show!

So far this morning I've been catching up on work. One of the things about working trade shows in sales is that sales remains the "day job" while the show is also taking up most or all of the day. So we salespeople are always stealing moments here and there to catch up on emails, respond to Slack messages, and keep business moving forward with all of our customers. It's relaxing, though, having only one day job this morning. 🤣 My shift in the booth begins at 11:30am. Update, 10:45am: Today's keynote ended really early, and my colleagues have called me to come to the booth as it's being mobbed.

Napa Trade Show blog #4
On break in my room - Tue, 9 Sep 2025, 2pm.

Today the vendor part of the trade show kicked off. Yesterday was arrivals and was also a training day for people who wanted classes from the main sponsor. Plus a chance for our team to enjoy dinner together before everyone's worn out from long days.

I was up early today for internal meetings from 7 until 8:30 then walked over to the trade show at 9. It's so convenient being in the same hotel as the show— and that hotel not being a Las Vegas mega-resort with 3,000 rooms in multiple towers where getting from a sleeping room to a conference room entails a walk of a mile engulfed by clouds of 25 years of accumulated second-hand cigarette smoke.

Right now I'm back at my room taking a break after lunch. It's been a slow start at the booth today. Why slow? Frankly, because of poor planning by the conference organizer.

I got to the booth at 9 today... and it was pretty much dead. It was dead until after 12pm because the keynote speeches were running. We knew the keynotes would be going and they'd suck all the attention away from the vendor area. But the keynotes all ran long, gobbling up the breaks between sessions when attendees might come out to visit us. The physical layout of the show disfavored us, too.

Yes, it's important for a show to support its vendors. We vendors help sponsor the show! We're all paying money to be here. ...And I don't just mean spending money on salaries and travel costs. We're paying fees in the five figure range directly to the host company just to be here. That's in addition to what we pay the hotel for our rooms, the construction team for assembling the booth, and all the travel costs of the staff. In return conference organizers need to treat the vendors well.

What does it take to treat vendors well? Give the attendees reasons to visit us. Put ample break times in the schedule for attendees to browse the vendors exhibit area. Put the free snacks and drink in the vendor area, so there's extra reason to come by. Put the lunch and dinner either in the vendor area or on the other side of us, so attendees have to walk past us.

So far today these show organizers have not done the above. There have been no breaks for attendees to come visit us. Everyone's running long on presentations— one ran 30 minutes over— and they're just slotting the next speaker immediately after the previous. Then at lunch today, lunch was in the opposite direction from where we vendors are. People had no reason to walk past our displays. In fact, worse than no reason they specifically had reason not to go near us— because we were in the opposite direction and nobody had extra time because the schedule was still 15 minutes behind.

Now, you might scoff at supporting vendors at the show as the tail wagging the dog. People are here for the show, right? We're just the advertisers everyone would be happier ignoring. But like advertisers in commercial TV, we're paying to help support the show. We're here because we want the opportunity to talk to prospective customers. And we have metrics. We measure the number of contacts in the booth ("raw leads") as well as the quality of conversations ("qualified leads"). And when those metrics are low, especially the qualified leads score, we stop sponsoring the show.

This is our third year at this show. The past two years it was very productive for us. This year, unless things turn a massive 180° later today, may be our last at this show.