It’s funny the little rabbit holes you fall through in life.
As confessed last time, I am off on a press trip to LaLa Land, to the E3 Expo. This is a huge deal if you are into video games – it’s where the games industry launches all the big new titles and generally goes woo a lot.
And it’s where people like me, who are much less than expert when it comes to gaming, wander about looking confused. There’s no way I can bluff my way through this – no point in trying to strike up a conversation with “How about that Spider Solitaire, eh?”. So I’m planning lots of nodding and smiling.
The good thing about having trained in coaching and NLP is that you can pretty much talk to anybody. You could mess with their mind a bit, but that would be mean. So it’ll be questions, nodding, smiling, repeat until bedtime.
Much as I am looking forward to the trip, getting ready for it has been a real stresser. I haven’t slept well in about a week. There’s just so much to prepare. It’s only when you try to extricate yourself from your life that you realise how tightly you are wound up within it. And then I start saying ridiculous things like “You will remember to fish the hair out of the plughole if I die in a plane crash, won’t you?”.
This being my first major press trip, it’s all a good learning experience. So far I have learned:
- You won’t get a press trip without a guaranteed commission. It’s not just a free holiday.
- Try to see the schedule of the trip as early as possible, so you can work out what you can pitch off the back of it. The more separate features you can do, the better use of your time you’ll make.
- Apparently there is always one oddbod on every press trip. If you can’t spot them, that means you are them. Smoky Jane, who’s a veteran of press trips, calls it “the Big Brother moment” when you meet your fellow trippers. Sounds terrifying.
- If your kids are pissed off because you’re going to Disneyland without them, on no account mention that you’re going to see Toy Story 3 as well.
- Nobody cleans the hair out of the plughole in my house except me.