It's A Drama!

Maybe I woke up in the wrong side of the bed the day I left Kuala Lumpur. For a start, I wasn’t feeling good, my head was giddy, my nose was stuffy and I had mistaken the date of my flight until I received an sms from Nattalina saying that she would come over at 230pm. The first flight to Singapore via MAS left me feeling flabbergasted with a thumping landing that could wake up a giant. Everything about that flight was vulgar and I didn’t connect with the 1MH, Malaysian Hospitality concept being marketed by MAS. Perhaps, it was the rookie who flew that plane and an hour was a short time to assess an airlines.

Stranded in Paris

I slept all my way to Paris via AirFrance and arrived at Paris de Guelle at 610am in the morning to discover that the flight to Hannover got cancelled due to bad weather. Apparently we arrived on the day of the Europe storms that left people die and homeless. After about 5 hours of queuing, we received our accommodation for the night and meal tickets from AirFrance. The night spent at Campanile hotel was the night wasted and the next morning at 11pm, we boarded AirFrance to Hannover after a delayed one hour flight. By that time, we hadn’t changed any clothes for two days, we were frustrated, tired and feeling lousy.

Upon arrival at the Hannover Airport, the first luggage that came out to the belt was ours and the second luggage; the most important one didn’t arrive at all. “We are going to send your luggage to the hotel today,” assured the lost baggage lady of AirFrance without any doubt in her eyes. And on the first day, we were at the show with practically nothing. Vacant booth and ourselves to display. Our luggage that contained the terminals, brochures, and everything else was still stuck somewhere and the lady who provided us an assurance yesterday couldn’t care less that we were in CeBIT without anything to display.

It’s a depressing situation but we were determined to make the best out of what we had. Nattalina made a good decision to bring some brochures in our hand carry luggage and we were using those flyers and our beautiful faces to entice people to our booth, which hadn’t been that successful (haha!)

Me in front of the entrance, CeBIT is a humongous show! Kudos to the organizer!

It’s freezing but apart from the unforgiving weather, we found it easy to move around the city. The tram system is well established; we stayed at the suburb and it took us around 11 minutes to the city center and 30 minutes to the exhibition center via tram.

Nattalina attending to visitors

The luggage came on the midnight of the 2nd March. The booth was set and many people came to the booth, most of them were end-users, very excited to try the fingerprint and face technologies. The Keylock 8800 garnered a lot of attention from Europeans. The plus point was that decision makers were the ones who came. Distributorships for France, Italy and Germany look positive and we are hoping that the samples bought will lead us to fruitful relationships.

Scenic Hannover

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ