Our travel accommodations to the 2006 HOW Design Conference should have been a sign to me of things to come. The fact that I dragged my lead designer to the airport with ticketing information that was 5 hours ahead of our actual flight and was flying out LaGuardia, the foulest hobgoblin of all New York airports should have delicately iced the proverbial cake of doom I was about to taste for 4 days in a little town called Las Vegas.

The one thing I realized after several hours of what could be deemed as the “6 o'clock happy hour” in Vegas is that it would abruptly be followed with what shall forever be etched in my mind as “hooker hour” - The hour of 3am, when all of the most fiendish Las Vegas call girls descend on the bars like slime on a Jersey Pond with one thing on their minds - Cash.

It was during one of these moments of booze fueled bliss, that three designers: myself, Bill English of theMechanism and Carl Smith, of nGen fame, found ourselves surrounded by a party of one with trouble etched directly on her delicate, yet acned forehead.

First of all, we thought for sure that she would take the hint...all the yapping about fonts, business strategy and process would scare away even the most persistent of Vegas’ “Ladies of the Evening,” correct? How wrong we could have been. It was time to change strategy. With a simple point of my finger (at Carl) and a miraculous lie (Carl was the owner of eBay), Bill and I managed to curtail the desparate situation and run to the tram that connected the Excalabur to Mandalay Bay with a bevy of hookers in hot pursuit like 1960's teenagers chasing the Beatles.

Now before you begin to worry about Carl, I must remind you that the guy is quicker in situations of dire stress than Mama Cass on a Ham Sandwich. After speaking with the fella the next day, it turns out that he spun a tale on that poor girl that would have scared a junkyard dog from a free steak with meat gravy, served on a plate made of...meat.

So all’s well that ends well, right? Well there’s more to this tale my eager readers. But that will have to wait until tomorrow...