Error 404: A Bitter Mousetrap

Monday, Nov. 17, 1997 | 7:20 a.m.

The worst part of Comdex - aside from the dozen other worst parts - is the amount of time you spend doing nothing. Walking from one exhibit to another. Waiting for myriad presentations to begin. Wondering which piece of your personal or professional life is falling apart while a spokesperson patiently explains how your time could be more efficiently managed by their latest indispensable product (usually a pricy upgrade from last year's indispensable product).

It's downright pornographic, I tell you. I wasted a good five hours today and became increasingly annoyed and frustrated by degrees, all the while looking at stuff that's supposed to make my life easier. In the interest of maintaining my truce with the dual-fisted Southerner who runs accounting (you'll get my receipts in the morning, please don't hurt me) my time breaks down as follows:

Hunting for a damn parking space: 45 minutes.

Walking from Sahara Hotel (the closest available spot) to the Las Vegas Convention Center: 15 minutes.

Navigating annoying construction detour in front of LVCC: 10 minutes.

Stumbling around convention floor, dazed, annoyed and frustrated: 3 hours, 30 minutes.

Walking back to car: 20 minutes, not counting brief "No, I don't want an outcall dancer, thank you" interludes.

And there you have it. With a few minor differences here and there, Comdex is the same overblown event it has been for the last two years. There may be some refinements here and there - I'm pretty sure at least two of the gearheads changed their shirts since last time - but by and large, it's the same shot of novocaine.

For those of you who haven't experienced Geekstock live, it looks like a giant issue of Wired vomited inside an airplane hangar. Floor-to-ceiling displays, replete with Netscape-legal pastels and huge projection screens, trumpet the age of deformation. Spokesmodels speak to interested parties using amplified headsets even if standing two feet away from the listener.

And then there's the commercial. Every major hardware/software company boasts the same commercial, with ever-so-slight variations, looping continuously on dozens of High-Definition TV monitors: color-saturated, quick-edit shots of children / hot babes / well-coiffed guys with washboard stomachs running through the Parthenon / across the Great Wall of China / down an unidentified beach, while somebody sits on his/her ass and watches them on his/her monitor and smiles.

Then a flurry of software images flash by - spreadsheets, web browsers, e-mail documents - before the spot ends with a fade to black and the company's natty slogan, issued by a voiceover artist with a warm and grandfatherly / sultry and kittenish / thoroughly robotic tone.

Xerox's slogan, "Generation Xerox," proves conclusively that wholesale idiocy does indeed have a long shelf life. Sony's hopeful plea for the consumer to "Empower your mind" says nothing about what they'll do to our wallets given half a chance. And Microsoft's deceptively benign "Where do you want to go today?" could just as easily be "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

There are those who would say I'm not in the spirit of the proceedings; that I'm not down with the "information revolution." Thank God. If I ever buy into this cheap huckster jive, I've left instructions with loved ones to have me lobotomized. Information does not equal marketing. The medium is never the message; if it was, Milli Vanilli would have more cultural significance than Machiavelli. And contrary to what Comdex would have you believe, the future they're presenting isn't the entire picture. The path to the future is paved with work, work, work and work, and all the commercials in the world aren't going to change that.

Oh, yes. You get me for four more days. Lucky you! If you've got something that will really make my life easier - say, a private parking space right behind the LVCC, or an electric golf cart to plow down gearheads left and right - send me an electronic missive (the wave of the future!) at carter@ vegasdeluxe.com.

I'll be over this by tomorrow. I swear.