To anyone who hasn't done it, setting up an exhibit at a trade show probably sounds simple. You just have to unload the truck and put the pieces together, right? Well, sometimes it doesn't go that way. Sometimes you don't even have a truck full of pieces.

This happened to me a few years ago when I was an account exec at an exhibit house and one of my clients was a large sporting goods company. Part of my job was to oversee setup of the client's booth at an annual show in Atlanta, but this was like a setup on steroids. The structure, which was on a 6-foot-tall raised platform, sprawled a massive 80-by-160 feet and was covered with an upper deck across parts of it – making it officially bigger than some small villages.

As the company's product lines grew, so had the second level, with new double-deck areas added little by little over time. This particular year, the client wanted a new 20-by-80-foot section above the main floor so it could move conference rooms up there. We fabricated the support beams for that addition in our Chicago shop, and then we arranged for them to be shipped to the show's advance warehouse. The rest of the display was stored year-round in a warehouse near the show site in Atlanta, as the entire thing required something like 28 trucks to transport it, and the cost to haul it farther than across town would have been astronomical.

Assembling the booth was a mind-numbing orchestration that included an early setup favor from the general services contractor, careful staging for the arrival of each truck in a precise order, and 24-hour labor for four days. The fifth day of setup was reserved for the clients to place product; thus, our planning and execution had to be perfect so we could be out of their way.

Our team descended on Atlanta and began setup, finishing the main level on day one. On day two, we were ready to install the structural beams for the second deck. One by one, trailers were brought over to the freight docks and unloaded, but when our installation supervisor signaled for the trailer containing beams for the new section, it was like someone shoved a stick into the cogs of a perfectly turning wheel. "What trailer?" asked the guys in the marshalling yard.

If you've ever seen a marshalling yard, you know that it is a sea of trucks and trailers, so it's not unheard of for a single trailer to be temporarily misplaced. After several minutes of head scratching by workers in the yard, my supervisor set off on foot to find the errant shipment. Nothing. GSC staff joined him for another pass, but still nothing.

Our first assumption was that the trailer had not been brought over from the early receiving storage managed by the GSC. Staffers double checked, however, and said there was nothing sitting there. Moreover, they checked their receiving documents and said the trailer had not been delivered.

This was, of course, preposterous, because we had received confirmation from the shipper that a tractor truck had dropped off our shipment a couple of weeks earlier. The only other possibility, we decided, was that the cargo had mistakenly been shipped to the warehouse in Atlanta where we stored the remainder of the exhibit. We sent a member of our team over to the warehouse, but learned that there was nothing there either.

Nonplussed, I called the shipping company and was again assured that the freight had been delivered, and the shipper had documentation to prove it. By the same token, the GSC had no documentation suggesting that the item ever existed.

This escapade was throwing us off schedule, and we did not have time to look for a trailer that had ghosted away. However, I realized ruefully, we'd be able to make up that time fairly quickly if we didn't have a 20-by-80-foot section of deck to set up. But the prospect of that made me sweat, because I couldn't imagine how I would sell that as the bright side to my clients.

With half the day gone, I decided it was time to stop scouring Atlanta for our missing aluminum beams and start worrying about what we were going to do next. To keep us moving forward, the labor crew built around the area where the new double deck was supposed to go while my supervisor and I wracked our brains for a plan. What we needed were aluminum beams cut to custom lengths.

My guy got on the phone and started making calls, and by some miracle, by mid-afternoon he had turned up an aluminum manufacturer a few hours from Atlanta who had what we needed. Workers could cut our custom lengths and have the beams on a truck headed our way by the following afternoon.

Overjoyed, we completed as much as we could while we waited for the beams. I decided not to tell my client about the missing materials – we had solved the crisis, and if someone had to eat the cost, it was going to be my company anyway.

The truck carrying our replacement beams arrived the next day, but we told the freight dock to hold onto the shipment for a while. After the client left for the evening, we hustled the delivery in and had the overnight crew build the deck. By the time client reps arrived the next morning, the deck was fully constructed, and everyone was working on other parts of the booth.

No doubt, to the client reps it probably seemed like magic, but they had no idea it was just the latest parlay in a week that had been full of mystifying events. The first, of course, was the vanishing semitrailer. The second was our unimaginable luck in finding exactly what we needed to replace its contents. The last feat of amazement was that everyone kept their cool so well through the ordeal that the client never knew how uncool the situation actually was.