a turd in a punchbowl...

OK I know the title is weird to say the least, but that's the best way to capture how strange the last two days were.  For those that think I'm to blame for the strange saying it was courtesy of someone I worked with at NARM 2008.

So NARM stands for National Association of Record Merchandisers and they had their annual convention in San Francisco (well as of this writing they are still having it).  What is record merchandising?  These guys are the people that take an album from the record label (distributors) and get it to the stores (retailers).  So this convention was a meeting of distributors and retailers.  After working this convention I realized that I enjoy doing backend work that helps pull off an event like this and I would actually consider working for a live sound company doing events like these.  Why was it odd?  Well it was very surreal b/c the whole thing is about dropping names, dropping cards, and networking like crazy.  I could handle the networking part, but the name dropping and more importantly the card dropping part was weird.  On more than one occasion there were people telling me (or people I worked with) that they were so and so or doing X dollars business and should therefore be let in for free.  I didn't realize how vigilant at conventions like these (where badges cost upwards of 1K bucks) one needed to be to prevent riff raff from getting in.  I was able to work in the press room for a bit and received a very strict explanation about how if we couldn't find an article a "journalist" wrote then they weren't allowed in.  I don't think I have ever been surrounded by so many sales people at one time, which was what contributed to the weird feeling. 

There was another story but that goes in my next post.