Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition.

Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug!

True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it.

As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than my colleagues. Or something. I’ve never been entirely clear on that front.

Recently, that involved me taking a depressing metal tube on rails, containing other people’s exhaled breath and expired dreams, to Manchester. A timing issue meant I was unable to obtain a cappuccino at any point, so by Wigan I was nearly comatose and contemplated wrestling fellow commuters for theirs, or pulling the emergency cord.

Once I’d crawled lethargically off the train and refuelled, it was time to experience the fertile hunting ground that is an exhibition, a bizarre circus where everyone cheerfully smiles at those on the next stand, whilst secretly hoping they drop dead at any second. With the probable exception of the British Heart Foundation, who were there too.

As I arrived before the rush of potential customers, I took the opportunity to stroll around and take in what the competition were up to. Unless you want to be engaged in an exaggeratedly chummy conversation with a fellow exhibitor desperate to sell you their services, you have a couple of alternatives: 1) Hold you phone up to your ear and talk earnestly – this only works if your Mum doesn’t ring you half way through to check if you’re coming for tea at the weekend. 2) Take someone with you and hold a conversation at all times, so no-on can get your attention.

I chose option 2, but had cunningly gone with a contingency plan in case having a colleague with me didn’t work. Wearing jeans at an HR show works like some kind of force field, and other exhibitors largely don’t quite seem to know how to react.

Six hours, an expensive sandwich, some artisan crisps and a selection of disappointing freebies later and I was once again attempting to shoehorn myself into a packed train for the journey back to Cumbria and reality.

Has anyone ever won an iPad by putting their business card in a bowl? Thought not.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 13th of November 2015. The paper retitled it as "Exhibition not for the fainthearted". I think I liked mine better...

It hasn't made it on to their website, so I'm currently down to just two appearances on their Columns page, and my unofficial attempt on world domination (starting with the south west of the north west) seems to have stalled. Still, the uniform and jackboots were bloody uncomfortable...

In a masterpiece of timing, my column appeared in the print edition next to the paper's BIG Issue, namely "What risks are you taking?" and running through the list of cancer-causing baddies, featuring a large picture of some bacon. So I was a fortnight too early with my bad-bacon column then. I could have looked like I was actually something to do with the paper if that had coincided.

Apologies for the week-long delay in posting this. Studying (See "Back to school" from 2nd August) has consumed excessive time recently, as an exam in a week and a half ... Oh, F***!... and me being behind schedule reading a book the size of a 1970s telephone directory, means I've been pushed for blogging time.

Still, I'm up to date now, leaving me plenty of time to panic.

(Tuneage this evening: Blur's newest, "The Magic Whip". On first listen, it's rather good, actually...)

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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