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Monday: Las Vegas
May 21, 2007

For absolutely no reason whatsoever I am going to add to the list of crazy, stupid stories that take up space on my website (www.printtec.com). My travels over the years have yielded some tales that are truly stranger than fiction. You cannot make this stuff up….
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I want to go on record to say
that I am NOT a big Las Vegas fan. The first time I was there was 1980. I was twenty years old and had driven 12 hours from Lake Tahoe (where I was a life guard at an Episcopal Church camp) to pick up a van-full of special needs kids and take them back. We drove all day, stayed up all night, and drove back all the next day. I remember taking a picture of the desert out of the front windshield (while driving, mind you) and mailing it back to my parents to help explain the drive.

My instructions were to stare
at the picture for 12 hours while a dozen people scream randomly behind you. So, let’s just say my first trip to Vegas was memorable. Come to think of it, my second was, too. Late in that same summer, I was flying to the University of Alabama from Reno and Las Vegas was our first stop. There was no change of planes, so we sat while people got off and new passengers got on.

The stewardess, trying to be helpful,
was mindlessly tossing the day’s newspaper on every other seat, most of which were empty. When she got to me, I grabbed it and read the headline. Apparently the flight attendant had failed to read what she was distributing. It was, to say the least, inappropriate for an airplane: “Canary Island Disaster: Two Planes Collide on the Runway. Hundreds Dead.”

Ah, Vegas!

This one is my all time favorite Vegas story
(seeing as it’s Vegas, there is more than one). I was there for Heidelberg, trying to save a Quickmaster DI that was going underutilized. My agenda was to convince the lone sales rep, a guy named Richard, that he really, really, really needed to learn how to sell digital so that Heidelberg could make enough money to stay in digital and pay me the exorbitant fee I was charging. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

that afternoon, which meant that I had to cruise at 11:30am ish. The meeting was set for 9:30am (yes, I can teach someone to sell digital that fast!). When 9:30am came, there was no sales rep in sight. Ten. No rep. 10:30am. Nada. At 10:45, Richard entered the room looking like he’d been dragged behind a beer truck. He fell in a heap into the chair and delivered one of
the best lines (deadpan) that I have ever heard: “Sorry I am late.
I am selling my house and had to dig something up out of the backyard.

My flight was set to leave at 1:30 pm

Ah, Vegas!

Posted by Bill Farquharson on May 21, 2007 | Comments (0)