DIGITAL CAMERA EXPO

Recently I spent the weekend working at the Digital Camera Expo in Darling Habour. At the time I didn’t realise how exhausting this event would be. I had to stand on my feet for 9 hours a day talking to people about the new Nokia phones that are going to be released. Normally I am used to standing as I used to do it in retail for 12 hours straight during the christmas rush but the problem here was the hard surface we had to stand on.

By the end of the program if I had to explain one more time to someone the features of the N73 and N93 mobile phone I was going to seriously scream. They both have 3.2 megapixels for the camera with the only major difference being the N93 has a 3X optical zoom. Of course one was quite chubby compared to the other one. I found that girls preferred the N93 even though it was chunky where as the guys preferred the N73 as it was quite slim and easy to fit into their pockets.

At our stand we had two Fujitsu photo printing machines to use to demonstrate to customers the quality of the photos printed from the Nokia phones. For some reason two Asian chicks decided to camp out at our machines day and night printing over 200 pictures. Its beyond me why they chose our stand anyway as the actually Fujitsu stand was opposite us with like 40 printing machines.

The problem was every time we wanted to demonstrate to a customer the printing we had to line up and wait for the Asian chicks to finish their printing. At one stage I was ready to grab both of them by the hair and throw them out of our stand. They were clogging up the machines.

On the first day of the expo we had a bowl of marbles with pencils stuck in them for decoration. PEOPLE starting stealing the pencils from the bowl. Who steals pencils from a bowl seriously? I would understand if they had Nokia or a brand name written on them but theses were plain unsharpened pencils.

I had to stop this Asian woman on the first day as I caught her pocketing 6 of the pencils into her son’s bag. I had to explain to this woman that theses were for decorations. She threw the pencils onto the table and ran off. It was like I was asking her for her kidney or something. The way she stormed off with that disgusted look on her face. Seriously who steals pencils? To add to it, we had six pears on the table for decorations, theses also started to go missing. People were taking anything they saw lying around.

The Nokia boss decided to head to the head office to bring back some free giveaways. A few hours later he rocked up with some Nokia bags, pens, mouse pads, lens cleaners etc. We had to put together some show bags in the storeroom. The minute I walked out of the store room onto the Nokia Stand I basically got attacked by a hungry mob of Asian who went completely psycho over a Nokia show bag. I couldn’t believe it. If the manager wasn’t behind me I was tempted to throw the bags in the air and let them chase it all over the ground for the free stuff. It’s amazing how people go crazy over the free stuff. The things in the bag aren’t even worth $10 but the people go crazy over them.

I met this really nice Swedish couple who were travelling around Australia. They had a camera memory stick, which we used to print out some of their pictures. I was amazed at some of the pictures they took. They had been travelling around Perth, Darwin, Ayers Rock etc Theses are places I have never been to but they looked amazing. I was so hyped up that I wanted to book and go to Ayers Rock on the spot.

The expo was a good experience as you tend to meet a lot of people and witness a lot of freaks out there who just rock up for the free stuff.