Had a few hours I had to take off this afternoon (comp time for overtime), so I drove downtown to the 2007 Chicago Auto Show. I haven't been to the show in years... and this time was the perfect time to do it - during the week, and during the day... though.. I was there for four hours - four hours of non-stop walking, no sitting, no eating, no drinking. In retrospect, this was a huge mistake. I can't do that anymore... my legs were twitching.. and almost flopping by the time I was trying to make my way back to the car...
Anyway, the day & time meant that the crowds were non-existent. You could walk the floor, look at the cars, sit in them if you'd like, without being jostled by so many people.
Great seeing all the cars... I was pleasantly surprised that you could actually find cars for under $20,000 that I wouldn't mind TOO terribly owning... And, of course... there were cars that I wouldn't mind owning in spite of their price. Oh, and another surprise was how nicely priced some of the hybrids were.
Now, unfortunately, it still wasn't a great experience being at the show for one specific reason -
Maybe it was because it was during the day. Maybe it was because they were free (to get in), but the amount of families with kids was pretty much unbearable. It wasn't that they were there - I am sure that mom & dad were there looking at possibly a new car for the family. The problem was that at a minimum 75% of the parents let their kids run rampant throughout the show floor, frequently having the kids leave the sight of the parents. They were everywhere, running, jumping in front of adults to open a car door, jump in and close the door behind them and sit and screw with the car for 5, 10, even 15 minutes at a time. It was unbearable. A lot of the vehicles have working batteries to be able to show-off their navigation displays, which means the radios are active... so let's see what hip-hop station we can pull in off of FM and how high we can crank the volume... I was at the Inifiniti exhibit, and had a kid almost push me out of the way to climb into the driver's seat of a GX35, only to close the door behind him, and, after some flailing at the switches and flipping the wiper and light stalks on the wheel, proceeded to stand up on the leather seats so that he can get outside the open sunroof, to yell at the rest of his family at the Hummer exhibit. No one stopped this kid, even when the family finally came by. How fed up was I? I was standing next to a Nissan 350Z convertible that I wanted to get in, but I was behind an elderly couple .. a little girl pushed her way ahead of us, climbed in and slammed the door shut. She then proceeded to immediately start playing with the power seats... pushing the seat as far forward as it could go, and then she played with the tilt.. to tilt her face damn near into the steering wheel... I let her, and prayed that she would just crush herself... the elderly couple eventually told to little asswipe that adults want to see the car and she reluctantly left, leaving the seat in the fully extended position, requiring the man to lean in and get the seat fixed before he could sit down... and it was 4 hours of this...
2008- UNO !!!!
2006- Join the crowd
2005- Wolves 4 - Aeros 5 (Shootout)
2004- "... and other jobs as required..."
2003- Please take a moment...
- Celebrity Mole Hawaii - Episode 6 - Finale
- Bright
2002- SLC Day 5
- Dead monarchs
- Oncology