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 a warehouse. Before the show, there was a hotstaging in the warehouse, where the cables were connected to equipment racks to be tested. Then, everything was packed up onto pallets to await the teamsters.

At midnight, a group of about 50 had gathered in the lobby of the convention center. Each member of the core team had a different colored shirt, each with the words "Do Not Disturb" stencilled on the back.

I was assigned to the teal team, under the leadership of Karl Auerbach. Karl was one of the founders of Epilogue Technology and a long-time participant in the INTEROP ShowNet. He's also a lawyer, which makes him a formidable rabble rouser at IETF meetings.

With a loud bellow, we were all called over for a briefing by Stev Knowles. (The ending "e" in "Steve" got left off of a mail message once, and Stev decided he preferred it that way.) Stev is vice president of engineering at FTP Software and is widely acknowledged as the loudest member of the ShowNet team.

Stev's briefing was, as usual, direct and to the point. "Do what you're told and if you have a question, ask."

Stev is an interesting character. Rumor is that he got involved in the very first ShowNet because he couldn't read his mail. The network wasn't working, so he marched into the show and commandeered the ShowNet team until things started working.

By sheer force of will, he and the other core team members do this every year, staying up for several days straight to get the network up and running. For this, everybody gets a t-shirt. Of course, the core team got put up by INTEROP at the Fairmont, but even the impressive bar bills they ran up didn't quite explain why they did this.

A few minutes after midnight, the doors opened and we all stood on the cavernous convention floor, clustered around our leaders. Two tractor-trailers were driven into the center of the floor and began to dump their contents. Equipment racks, spools of cable, and various other network paraphernalia were all hustled to their proper locations.