First Time in Las Vegas

I attended my first of many NAB tradeshows my sophomore year of college, with a large group of students from my TV production class.  We carpooled, and I was assigned to ride with two guys, Gil and Rob, in Rob’s car.  They were late that morning, and everyone else had already left by the time we connected up.  Rob had been up all night, and was clearly drunk.  That was supposed to be okay, because Gil was going to drive.  So we set off, with Rob immediately passing out in the passenger seat, and me stuck in the back.  Gil didn’t know how to get there, and while I didn’t either, I at least knew the general direction.  It became clear the Gil had no idea where he was going as we headed south through Los Angeles instead of northeast to Nevada.  Rob just kept mumbling about staying on 5, while I was in the back, trying to convince him that he was going in the wrong direction.  They eventually figured it out when Rob woke up as we past Knott’s Berry Farm and asked why we were there.  We got back on track, another hour or two behind as we left the city, and then we stopped for gas in the high desert.  Rob decided he wanted to drive, which I was obviously opposed to.  But it was his car, so I was left with the option to get in, or be left in the middle of the desert.  Because we were so delayed, there was no way to catch a ride with one of the other cars, they were hours ahead.

So I reluctantly got in, and we resumed our drive through the desert.  Things seemed fine, so I started to fall asleep.  I woke up for a moment to realize that Rob was head down, eyes closed, as we hurled down the straight line of pavement at 80 miles an hour.  “HEY!  How about I drive?”  Head pops up, eyes wide, car swerves a bit. “No, no, I’m fine.”  Even Gil was with me now that he had woken back up, but Rob refused to pull over.  So I sat in the middle of the back seat, and glared at him through the mirror, but even with me staring at him, his eyes would slowly close, until I would yell at him.  We did eventually make it, but it was a stressful couple of hours.

There were about fifteen of us that went, and because of a mistake by Rob who helped plan the trip, we had only had two hotel rooms to cram into.  I actually was lucky enough to get a bed, but I never ended up getting to sleep anyway.  That night we arrived, those over 21 went out drinking and gambling, after leaving the six of us who were under 21 with a bathtub full of ice and alcohol bottles in the hotel room.  I had never drank before, but am not strictly opposed to it, so that was my first time.  We played a variety of games and such that night, while they all tried to get me drunk, since I was the only one who didn’t do this frequently back at school.  I drank all sorts of stuff that night, but felt no effect of any of it.  The best they could claim, was that I was a bit more relaxed than usual.  So between the cost, the bad taste, and no effect on me, alcohol has never held much appeal to me.  Anyhow, we eventually headed to bed around 3am, but other people were constantly showing up from their night on the town, and all sorts of things happened, so for the first time in my life, I got absolutely zero sleep before heading to the show the next morning.

One of the other multimedia students was showing his work at one of the booths.  When we arrived on the show floor that morning, he realized he was missing a bunch of the files he needed.  This was another project supervised by Dan, so we ended up flying another student out to Vegas that afternoon, to bring us another drive of data.  I spent the day seeing the show, and hanging out with others in the group we had come with.  There was all sorts of dramatic fallout from the drunken exploits of the previous night, which I got to observe with amusement.

We spent the whole next night in Dan’s hotel room, working on a borrowed laptop and beta software to rebuild the project with the new copies of the data, to present the next morning.  I was the only one left awake by morning, due to their excessive consumption of alcohol while working all night, so I took the files in and setup the demonstration.  This made me look good with the company we were doing the presentation for, a San Diego software company called Cineform.  Once that was done, I headed back to connect up with the larger group that was heading back to school that morning, and made sure I had a different ride back home.  I ended up finally sleeping in the back of that suburban for the drive home, after being up for 60 hours straight.  It was one hell of a day in Vegas.