National Stationery Show Offline
I don’t know about you, but I find the National Stationery Show website one of the most frustrating and user unfriendly websites in cyberspace. I was trying to register for Seth Godin’s presentation entitled “Put it on Paper: The importance of pen and ink in the digital age,” and the system collapsed as I was checking out. Mr. Godin is one of the key tribal leaders of the digital generation (not sure he would like that designation) and the author of some 13 books on marketing and relevancy in the digital age.
Oddly enough, I came across Seth Godin when I installed my first Wordpress Blog and one of the PlugIns was entitled “What would Seth Godin do?” Like most people with a new toy, I really didn’t give a fig what Seth Godin would do, but in retrospect it would have been useful to listen to this wise “young” man since he is one of the few people to sort through the bits and bytes and make sense of this digital revolution. I commend Patti Stracher and the other NSS organizers for snaring Mr. Godin and I would encourage anyone who reads this article to get their tickets now. You will not be disappointed.
Ah, the National Stationery Show (“NSS”) website. In an effort to modernize, the NSS now has attendees register online. When you get to the show your digital pass will be scanned and you will be issued a paper registration tag with some mystery code that hides all kinds of personal data that might be useful to vendors. I liken the process to going through scanners at the airport. Fortunately, no groping is allowed.
While I am now immune to the dehumanization process of electronic screening, I blew a gasket when the registration system crashed as I was trying to checkout. The system simply swallowed my credit card information that I had used to sign up for a few courses and I had no idea whether I was registered since the system simply advised me to “come back later.” This was not the first time it had happened, but what can you do?
I then received a digital invitation to attend Seth Godin’s presentation as well as a paper invitation. Thank God for paper. Neither my wife nor I could open the digital invitation – it was so well encrypted that my browser refused to open the images. In fact, we were prompted to download the latest version of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer 8. It was then I realized how clever Patti had been: She was making the point that there are many gremlins in digital communications. Indeed!
As much as we beat up on the poor Postal Service, e-vites have their own inconveniences. I made the mistake of opening a “song and dance” video birthday card on my smart-phone and realized that it was configured for a 4G network rather than a 2G network. It took forever to download and by the time it did, my battery had died so I missed the cool e-Birthday greeting. Rather than spending time disabling the pop-up suppressor and going to the tools menu to all “pictures,” I have simply stopped reading evites. Eventually, someone will call you and ask you if you are attending. Is it rude not to open an evite along with the other junk mail in your inbox?