This year, I surprised myself by jumping at the opportunity to attend CES 2017.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of the coverage the event has gotten over the years on YouTube and television networks: the new gadgets, the fascinating developments in software and hardware, the changes to daily life promised by the exhibitors of the show. I figured that seeing it all firsthand might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so I didn’t dare turn it down.

And I wasn’t wrong. The show is pretty unbelievable, both in scale and in living up to its promise. I’ve been to other conventions, but never anything of such magnitude, and admittedly some of the tech on display was breathtaking. There’s a large part of me that cannot wait to see more people interacting with holograms, augmented reality applications, 3D printers, and self-driving cars.

The coverage for this event is almost unanimously positive. Anywhere you look, people are gushing over the companies and their products and the general atmosphere of the trade show. The attendees can neither believe their eyes nor how fortunate they are for having been invited to the event in the first place.

We spent three days wandering between massive show floors, and by my best estimate covered only around half of the exhibitors, booths, and otherwise. We weren’t able check out any of the speakers or events (aside from pointing out Shaquille O’Neal at the Inside the NBA broadcast), forced instead to devote our time to gawking at products or pretending we hadn’t made eye contact with the people with “Exhibitor” printed on their badges.

Truly, these people seemed to scream for help from enthusiastic smiles. Their desperation was palpable as my girlfriend and I navigated through the far narrower aisles at the edges of every convention floor. They were like carnival barkers and mall kiosk vendors merged into grotesque images of attentive salesmanship, asking in thick accents if we’d like to find out more about cyber security or waterproof phone screens. When the show shut down in the evenings, we often came across people with business cards poking out of suit jackets singing karaoke to awful pop songs in their exhibits, surely counting down the minutes until they could go back to their hotel rooms and drink. Possibly the most devastating of all were the Koreans we found in the Sands Expo, of which at least one was asleep in every booth, their faces flat against display tables or lying prone against colorful advertisements. In the large walkthroughs separating the international brands by their respective nations of origin, these men and women slept on every available piece of furniture.

I suppose I didn’t take full notice of the sad state of the exhibitors until the second day, when a man who looked very much like Bubbles from The Wire wearing a Kill me! expression explained how his brand’s iPad app could change my girlfriend’s facial features at a makeup shop near her in the coming months. He cared so little about the script he recited (predominantly focused on distancing their brand from those primitive Snapchat filters) that I was sure he was sending me messages through his pained facial tics.

Immediately afterward, a man dispiritedly representing his company’s pocket-sized drones grimaced at us in apology as he was forced to listen to another man in a wheelchair explain his interest in disability accommodations. He actually cut this person off to compliment my girlfriend on her looks in comparison to the poor guy he was talking to, handing us thin paper adverts about his plastic flying spy cameras in the process.

Each company’s booth presented to the viewer a range of existential anguish. Whether these people were merely tired or ready to throw themselves from the roof of the Venetian, I could not always tell. And I’ll allow that in some cases I might have been projecting my own despair at the monstrous capitalist behemoth these people were working their asses off to find their niche in.

But no one really wants to hear about these people, do they? It’s the machinery we care about. What was the most mind-boggling virtual reality experience at the show? Which company had the most impressive booth? Was the Tesla killer all it was cracked up to be? When can I get the Internet of Things in my house?

Yes, I enjoyed my experience at CES like I would any amusement park of the future. The fact that human beings are capable of creating such marvels is something in itself to appreciate. I just wish we could treat the people who created them a little better.

Before you ask, no, I probably won’t own anything displayed there for the next decade.