Comment by mauvehaus
2 days ago
I love that seemingly random trades that we largely take for granted have these case studies that result in awards for things us muggles never think about.
A garage I went to subscribed to a trade magazine for towing and recovery companies and left the issues in the waiting room. Sure enough, they had a recovery of the year type of award.
There are awards for the best awards
https://awardsawards.conferenceawards.co.uk/
I suspect awards are one of the more profitable niches of the wider events industry.
They're cheaper to produce than a full-scale conference (needing just a 1 day hire of a hotel ballroom or similar) and are easy to sell - every business or team nominated for an award will pay for a table, as will various suppliers and vendors who see it as a great marketing opportunity.
you know an award is actually legit when someone from a trade body contacts you the week before sounding slightly put out that nobody from your member company is flying to Europe to attend their event even though you did fill out an application form, you assume their event must be a bit short of attendees but reluctantly dip into the small startup budget for a single person to fly out there because "something something networking", and then your colleague gets surprised by actually winning it whilst surrounded by the teams everyone else sent.
on the other hand, I found it hilarious one of my father's old companies publicly sponsored a special new category of award at a legit-seeming construction event. You'll never guess who won...
I was at one committee meeting when the annual award ceremony came up. One person was considered for an award because she had a big family with many cousins and nieces. All the better to sell tables.
It looks more like awards for events, e.g. "Most Creative and Engaging Event" and "Best Event Series (over 1800 attendees)," none of which seem to have anything to do with the quality of any awards given at those events. What am I missing here?
We need a few more of these so we can have the Awards Awards Awards.
It makes me feel uninformed about the world, but in a good way. It leaves me mildly awestruck when I learn about some new invisible corner of our society that has so much more depth than I realized. I appreciate elevators more (both from a safety perspective and as a convenience) knowing there are people who care so much about them.
I worked at a company that got a magazine dedicated to managed printing services.
I used to work at a local paper that also ran a quarterly trade magazine on the chicken processing industry.
I feel like that sounds less weird when you really start to think about it. There is lot of chicken being processed. And the margins must not be great and competition between suppliers must be at least somewhat fierce...
So there are good use cases for capital if you are in that market.
Muggles? You me unskilled overpaid llm prompters who are amazed by the world of real work?
We can't all be wizards at everything, as evidenced by the electrical "surprises" I keep uncovering in this house I own that was built by a plumber.
Curious what? Residential wiring is just about the simplest building trade there is. Plumbing is actually far more complicated, you got to figure slope and elevations and make junctions that hold pressure for years or drain pipes that flow waste water for years. Electrical is prettly plug and play by comparison. Commerical and three phase gets more complicated.
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