My job, as technical advisor, was to play the game for about 10 hours a day, answer questions, and help with sales. The first day we ad a small panic when our game server went down briefly after an update but apart from that it was smooth sailing.

I didn’t get to walk around much due to the activity at our showroom floor but I did stroll around once or twice and checked out a few products.

The food in the food court was outrageous and I quickly learned that the “Street Meat”…vendors with carts outside the Javits Center had the best food and prices.

In the evening I was able to wander around a little by Times Square and had some great dinners at the Landmarc, John’s Pizzaria, and Sushisamba 7.

Tuesday night I started to feel ill and on Wednesday I was so sick I did not make the last day of the show. I made it to the airport early because of this and managed to get on an earlier flight…which ended up screwing me.

Apparently Atlanta was having terrible thunderstorms and after 2 hours of circling we were redirected to Knoxville to refuel and then headed back to Atlanta. If I had taken my original flight I would have made my connection but due to the “early” flight I did not and spent the night sick on the floor of Atlanta Airport. Yay.

To say I was happy to finally make it back to Gainesville on Friday would be a mild understatement! Pictures coming soon in the gallery…promise!

This would normally have been a 4 or 5 hour task but instead took 2 days as instead of being smart and pre-ordering items and having them delivered, our company CFO thought it best to try and transport two, 42″ LCDs, three laptops, and other electronic gear from Best Buy without pre-ordering…yea…that took about 4 hours.

The only funny part of this was while waiting for a taxi in 30 degree weather, a woman with a baby in a stroller came out and I let her have the taxi I had just hailed. She gave me an odd look and said, “You aren’t from around here are you?”

A bit of a shame when being a gentleman is considered an oddity.

Eventually I made it back to the Javits center where I made friends (being facetious) with the local Union guys…the “Freeman”. Talk about a racket…I’d avoid doing business in NYC just to avoid being bent over.

They got pissed off when they found out when I had already setup two laptop + HDTV displays without their help. They were going to shut our booth down and I told them to piss off but one of the other team members got scared and told them to finish the last two…so we paid $100 an hour to watch some guy screw bolts  into a bracket into a LCD monitor. This guy was actually cool…the foreman…Anthony…was a doucher.

I did manage to strike back for the good guys by circumventing their rules on networking and bring my own router and running multiple lines out of the one line they gave us instead of paying them $2000 for it or something retarded.

Thursday night I stepped out and saw two of my friends in NYC…Darby and Laura. I went out to a wonderful restaurant called the Landmarc with Darby and then stopped by Laura’s and caught up.

On Saturday, the rest of the team arrived and it was game on from there!

Pictures of Toy Fair 2009 will be added to the gallery soon!