It was a Friday afternoon at McCormick Place, and union rules let me set up my 10-by-30-foot booth for Monday's show open by myself. I was the only person from my company there — the rest were arriving Monday. The floor was loud, as it always is on those set-up days. You could hear the whir of drills, the beep of reversing forklifts, and the voices of people shouting back and forth as they got ready for the next week. I was so focused on the task at hand that the din turned into white noise that I easily ignored.

I had just finished setting up the booth's main structure and took a break to admire my work when BOOM! I was on the floor bleeding. Did a header fall from the ceiling? Was the facility under alien attack? It turns out it was none of that — a forklift operator wasn't watching where he was going and backed straight into the back side of my booth, knocking the structure down on top of me! I'm sure the forklift was beeping as it reversed — it's the law! — but I didn't hear the warning sound.

The next thing I knew, I was in the ER, and to this day, I have no memory of how I got there. The doctors were stitching up a giant gash in my hand, delivered by a sharp, knife-like piece of aluminum. One of the central features of our booth was a beautiful Plexiglass and aluminum logo panel. It was eye-catching, but its sharp edges were nothing to tangle with!

I left the hospital with a handful of painkillers and strict orders to head straight back to my hotel for five days of bed rest. Five days?! No way, doc! I had a deconstructed booth on the show floor. And attendees were going to show up in two!

Against doctor's orders, when I left the ER, I bypassed my hotel and went straight back to the convention center to survey the damage. Luckily nothing was broken, but even though the painkillers were kicking in, there was no way I was going to be able to set up the booth again with my stitched-up arm in a sling.

So I got a hold of the general service contractor. Obviously, they wanted to do everything to help me because their forklift operator was to blame for my dilemma, so a few of their people gathered in my broken-down booth. Like a conductor before an orchestra, just with one less working arm, I directed everyone in putting the booth back together. After preparing to spend a weekend of solo booth building, I never expected to be in a supervisor role!

The team did a fabulous job and had the booth set up in no time. When my colleagues arrived at the show floor on Monday, the only thing different from what they expected to see was my Franken-arm. And I never saw even one hospital bill!

My company made more of those Plexiglass and aluminum panels over the years, and after my experience, I always asked designers to use as little aluminum as possible and make sure the edges were filed down. And never again have the reversing beeps of a forklift become white noise. When I hear it, I'm the one who backs up!