Because all three of us are huge dorks and love the possibility of getting free computer stuff, Tom, Nathan, and I drove out to Dave & Busters right after work to attend the Digital Boot Camp. Sponsored by Intel, Maxtor, HP, NEC, Intervideo, and BFG, the Digital Boot Camp was supposed to be fun and informative. According to the invitations we received, thousands of dollars worth of give-aways were supposed to be raffled off the entire evening. So, we went.
In all actuality, the evening itself appeared to be nothing like what the invitation advertised. Yes, food and drinks were provided, but that was about the only halfway decent thing the whole night. Two of the vendors didn't even show up for the Detroit event, one of which happened to be one that I was very much looking forward to hearing about. As far as prizes went...everyone sort of took the cheap way out. Intel raffled off two motherboard/processor bundles (which they sold last year for about $200 each,) HP raffled off one HP iPod complete with 240 shitty tracks pre-loaded for your listening pleasure, one NEC 17" gamer LCD monitor, and BFG raffled off one 6600GT video card. So, yeah...they all took the cheap route. There were five prizes total and 120+ attendees. The odds weren't exactly in our favor.
On top of that, we had to sit through over two hours of presentations on stuff that most of us already knew. Considering the fact that most of the stuff the vendors talked about is current technology that we all need to know about in order to sell it in our stores, most of the people in the audience were more than a little bored sitting through each presentation.
The worse presentation award of the night went to the NEC rep. This guy is always at Micro Center because he's a rep for about 32094732 different companies. Although he doesn't do a damn thing for any of them, other than record how many of a particular sku has been sold since the last time he visited, he still makes a decent amount of money doing so. From time to time, he'll lead a training session on a particular piece of technology one of his companies is trying to push. Each and every time he comes and does a training, it has to be one of the most painful things ever. This training event certainly wasn't any different. Half way through his presentation, the whole room was either talking amongst themselves or laughing at the poor guy. Unfortunately, this rep seems to think he's the best public speaker in the world. But, he has what I like to call the William Shatner syndrome, where he can't tie more than three words together at a time without pausing a great deal. Anyways, it was just really bad.
By the end of the presentations, we were all dying to get out of there. None of us won any prizes so we were all pretty bummed. The worst part about the whole thing was the fact that there we were sitting in Dave & Busters, and they didn't even supply us with game cards. Usually when you go to training like that, they at least buy a game card for each person and put like five credits on there. Yeah, its not much to play with, but at least they buy you a card. Did they do that for us? No. Sadly, Nathan, Tom, and I were the only ones who even bothered to stay after and play any games. Why would you drive all the way out there and not play games?
Needless to say, the highlight of our evening was playing all the games. We did some pretty ridiculous stuff, but we all had fun. The three of us were able to win enough tickets to get a deck of Dave & Buster playing cards and two rubber snakes. I know that sounds incredibly random...but it was about all we could get with the number of tickets we had.
Oh yeah, and we saw Curt there too. I miss not seeing him at work.