Will Wiles - The Way Inn

A tongue of white card spooled out of the printer connected to the woman’s laptop. In a practised, brisk move, she tore it off, slipped it into a clear plastic holder attached to a lanyard and handed it to me. ‘You’ll need this to get in and out of the centre,’ she said. I nodded, trying to convey the sense that I had done this before, that I had done it dozens of times this year alone, without being rude. But she pressed on, perhaps unable to change course, conditioned by repetition into reciting the script set for her, as powerless as the neat little printer in front of her. ‘Sure, sure,’ I said. Panic flickered in her eyes. ‘Just hang it around your neck – if you want to give your details to an exhibitor, they can scan the code here.’ A blocky QR code was printed next to my name and that of my deliciously inscrutable employer: NEIL DOUBLE. CONVEX.

‘Right,’ I said.

‘You can just hang it around your neck,’ she repeated, indicating the lanyard as if I might have missed it. In fact it was hard to ignore: a repellent egg-yolk yellow ribbon with the name of the conference centre stitched into it over and over. METACENTRE METACENTRE METACENTRE.

‘Right,’ I said, stuffing the pass into my jacket pocket.

‘Buses leave every ten or fifteen minutes. They stop right outside. And here’s your welcome pack.’ She handed me one of the folders, smiling like an LED.

I smiled back. ‘Thanks so much,’ I said. And I was fairly sincere about it. It’s a good idea to stay friendly with the staff at these conferences; I doubted I would see her again, but it was better to be on the safe side. Generally it was a waste of time trying to sleep with them, though – they often couldn’t leave their post, and they were kept busy. She had already moved on from me, directing her smile over my shoulder to whoever stood behind me. I saw that she had access to scores of disgusting emergency-services-yellow tote bags from a box beside her, but she had not offered one to me. A shrewd move on her part; I was pleased by her reading of my level of MetaCentre-tote-desire, which was clearly broadcasting at just the right pitch.

Breakfast was served in the restaurant, separated from the lobby by a sliding glazed wall. Flexible space, ready for expansion or division into a large number of different configurations. A long buffet table was loaded with pastries, bread, sliced fruit and cereals. Shiny steel containers sweated like steam-age robot wombs. Flat-screen TVs with the news on mute, subtitles appearing word by word. Current affairs karaoke. I poured coffee into an ungenerous cup from a pot warming next to jugs of orange, grapefruit and tomato juice, and put an apricot Danish and a fistful of sugar sachets on a plate. Then I started my hunt for somewhere to sit. Perhaps half of the seats were taken – lively conversation surrounded me. When a hotel is filled with people all attending the same conference, breakfast can present all sorts of diplomatic hurdles. I am rarely gregarious, and at breakfast time I am at my least social, always preferring to sit alone. This was in no way unusual – the hubbub disguised the fact that many of the diners here were alone, studying phones or newspapers or laptops. The first morning of an event can be the least social, before people fall into two-day friendships and ad hoc social bubbles. But I still had to be careful not to blank anyone who had come to recognise me. At other conferences, I might run into the same people once or twice a year. This one was different. These people I see all the time, everywhere; I am getting to know some of them; far worse, they are getting to know me. My detachment is a crucial part of what I do – these people don’t understand that. They love to think of themselves as a ‘community’; they thrive on ‘relationships’. No ‘community’ includes me. But try telling them that. Or rather, don’t try. Try telling them nothing. Adam had been most specific: keep a low profile.

But as I scanned the room looking for the right spot I realised, with a twinge of embarrassment, that I was not only looking out for people to politely evade – I was also trying to find the red-haired woman. But without luck. She was not in the restaurant.

A good spot presented itself. It was in a rank of small tables connected by a long banquette upholstered in white leather – a flexible seating arrangement, designed to suit both groups and lone diners. Two people I recognised were already sitting at one of the tables, and the chemistry of our acquaintance had about the right pH level. Phil’s company built the scanners that read bar codes and QR codes. We had talked at length before – it helps me to understand that sort of technology. His companion I knew less well – her name was Rosa or Rhoda, perhaps Rhonda, and she worked for a databasing service. I nodded to them as I sat, an acknowledgement carefully poised between amity and reserve. Let them make the first move. They smiled back, and their low-tempo conversation resumed. Were they sleeping together? Phil was at least fifteen years Rosa/Rhoda’s senior, and the ring finger of his left hand had shaped itself to his wedding band, but that meant almost nothing. Industry conventions dissolved other conventions. These events were often the Mardi Gras of their fiscal years: intervals of misrule, free zones where the usual professional and social boundaries were made fluid. At their worst they resembled the procreative frenzies of repressed aquatic creatures blessed with only one burst of heat per lifetime, seething with promiscuity and pursuit. And then, bleary-eyed, the attendees sat quietly on their planes and trains home, and opened their wallets not to buy more drinks, order oysters on room service or pay for another private dance, but to turn around the photos of their kids so they once again face outwards. What happened in Vegas, Milan, Shanghai, Luton, stayed there; it stayed where they had stayed, in Way Inn, Holiday Inn, Ibis, Sofitel, Hilton, where non-judgemental, faceless workers changed their sheets. But the body language between Phil and his companion didn’t support my hypothesis. Pretending to read the information pack I had been given, I watched them – I am of course adept at observing unobserved. There was no surreptitious touching, no encrypted smiles. They had the easy manner of friends, but they were talking business – data capture, facial recognition, RFID, retrieval technologies. Little of what they said conflicted with what I knew already.

Since I was staring at the conference programme, pretending to read it, I decided that I could divert some attention its way and give some thought to the day ahead. A couple of sessions on the timetable had been flagged up by my clients as mandatory – routine fare such as ‘The Austerity Conference’ and ‘Emerging Threats to the Meetings Industry’ – but it was always good to attend a few extra to get a rounded view of an event. No one expected a comprehensive report from every session – there were three halls of different sizes at the MetaCentre, with talks going on simultaneously in each, and further fringe events in function rooms in the hotels. All I needed was a sample. ‘Trap or Treat: Venue Contract Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them’. To avoid, I think. ‘China in Your Hands: Event Management in the Far East.’ That could be worth attending. By which, I don’t mean I expected to find it interesting – or that I did not. The things that interest me are not necessarily the things that will interest my clients. And these trade fair conferences are nearly always very boring. If they were not, I wouldn’t have a job. The boring-ness is what fascinates me. I soak it up: boring hotels, boring breakfasts, boring people, boring fucks, boring fairs, the boring seminars and roundtables and product demos and presentations and launches and plenary sessions and Pecha Kuchas, and then I … report. These people, the people sitting around me, the people whose work involves organising and planning the conferences I spend my life attending: if they knew what I was doing, and how I felt about what they did, they might not be pleased.