ASE10 Experience Extravaganza: Tuesday

More Booth Time, Session Fail, & Decompressing

I took the lead on managing the booth most of Tuesday while Forrest ran errands.  I did attempt to head into a session, but quickly learned that it wasn’t what I’d initially thought it would be.  I guess I must have read the description wrong (or, not at all, though that’s unlike me).  Tuesdays, especially in the afternoon, are always slow in the exhibit hall.  I had plenty of time to enter Buy.at’s twitter contest, and win a sweet gift card for DebShops.com (which I’ve already used!) and to enter into a booth war with nearby Andy Rodriguez Consulting.

I’d say they started it, but that might not be entirely accurate.

The day before, Andy Sr. loaded me down with a million tins of mints and an entire 12pk case of Oreos to lighten their shipping load.  By Tuesday afternoon, they were attempting to be rid of all the beach balls and stress balls they’d brought as well.  I went down to chat, and collect the Ear Pollution headphones I’d been promised (thanks again, Andy) and accused Andy Jr. of littering.  He said it was branding.  Potato, Potahto I guess.  Stress balls were thrown at me, which I successfully caught (at least, after that first time of being pegged in the knee with one).  I was also very proud of my throwing arm to return one of the balls clear past the three booths between ours and into their area (didn’t hit anyone…but honestly I was just glad I didn’t hit an innocent bystander!).

The afternoon ended after a rather disappointing lunch (I was hungry, so I still devoured it) and an early exhibit hall end time.  I had wanted to go to the closing session, but since I was pulling booth duty alone, I didn’t want to leave the booth unattended for too long.  The benefit is that the most colorful characters seemed to stop by the booth towards the end of Tuesday.  Many New York locals that wandered over after work on Tuesday to see what this “affiliate marketing” is all about, apparently.  It was interesting.

Earlier in the day, I’d gotten a text from Jen Goode trying to get a large group together for a final dinner in NYC, and of course for lack of a better decision (because it’s easy, and affordable) we headed around the corner to good old Oldcastle Pub.  I think I was there almost every day I was in NYC for one reason or another… Tuesday night was at least the 3rd dinner I’d eaten there!  We had a lovely dinner, and gracious Mike Nunez of AffiliateManager.com picked up the check for us – thanks again Mike!  We meandered downstairs to keep drinking after they decided to close the upstairs due to lack of staff, and kicked back in a corner discussing how our conference experiences had gone.

At a certain point, a few of us wandered over to Lindy’s to get some dinner and I took care of my New York cheesecake fix (thanks Debbie of Team Loxly!).  I realize that we got back to Oldcastle and then left to go back to Bridges Bar in the Hilton to see a few other people over there, so I think I owe someone a couple bucks for the ginger ale I had (if it was you, let me know, and I’ll send you a nifty craft or something in return!).  It was a nice chill way to close out the summit and say goodbye to my peeps.  Until we meet again in Las Vegas, folks!

Please feel free to view all the photos I took in New York: Affiliate Summit East 2010 on Flickr