Las Vegas Recap

Dear OTRgirl,

Have you ever seen such desolate wilderness as Vegas Valley?

Buggsy should have planted his resort on the backside of the moon. It would have been lovelier and had more water.

Love,
Dad

So true. I posted more photos on Facebook, but many of you aren’t part of that world, so I’m posting a couple over here as well.

I spent the hour and a half flight to Vegas looking out the window. I loved being able to see the traces of water-flow etched into the desert.


Flying into Las Vegas felt strange after passing over such barren land. Seeing lawns and swimming pools, bought with the waterflow meant for deltas in Mexico really irked me. I know I’m turning into a bleeding-heart over so many issues, but water-use in the West is definitely becoming one of my hot-buttons.


I was shocked that the Las Vegas Strip is literally right next to the airport. This picture was taken from the runway while the plane taxied into the terminal.


Overall, I was bemused by Vegas, but not overwhelmed. My focus, time and energy were on the convention we were producing. My coworkers are great and we had fun, so I didn’t have to think too much about the city itself.


That said, I did have to walk through two casinos as I went from one venue to the other. Each time, I felt sick. Not just the cigarette smoke, though that did give me a sore throat and headache, but the glazed looks in people’s eyes. I hated watching SO much money getting washed away. I kept thinking that if they would just invest that same amount they’d have a guaranteed jackpot. Yes, slower and much less thrilling, but worth far more in the end. Ah, whatever. I sound like a killjoy whenever I talk about it, let’s just say, it wasn’t my scene.

The funny thing about my work for this client is that 95 percent of our attendees are male tech-geeks. They don’t care what the signs look like. Yet all my approvers are marketing women, who care passionately. Sigh.

I got to help cheerlead the RockBand competition the first night. We wanted to get people playing it and psyched about joining teams and fighting toward being in a competition at the final party. Take a bunch of shy programmers and let them loose--turned out to be a great way to get them to interact and network.


I was able to meet with my main client counterpart. She’s based on the East Coast and most of our contact is via IM (Instant Messaging, Dad), so it was good to hammer out a couple things. She showed me the upcoming Big Show look/feel. It’s being developed by the ad agency that took over last spring. Her hope this year is that they create the initial look/feel and then pass it over to me to implement. That sounds MUCH better than what I feared: months of being a production artist and not a designer. We shall see how it all pans out, but it helped to see at least an initial presentation and to get a sense of what she’s thinking.

More power to those of you who have enjoyed Las Vegas as a vacation destination. It wasn’t on my life-list before and I was glad to shake the dust off my feet when I left. Sadly, the Account Executive on my team loved having me there and recognizes that I should be there for the site visit as well as the pre-show set-up. So, looks like more Vegas in my future. I guess we can’t all be lucky.