For five years, I lived across from the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, that huge concrete box propping up part of Freeway Park at the cusp between Capitol Hill and downtown.

More lately, I’ve occasionally temped there in between freelance gigs. I’ve gained a new appreciation for that city-within-a-city, that most earthbound segments of the floating world of business travel.

Despite the glamourous image of the ’50s-’60s “jet set,” business travel’s really what put the airline biz, hence Boeing and hence Seattle, into the big money. (In 1968, American Airlines advertised itself as a company “built for the professional traveler.”) While some people travel on business year-round as dealmakers or sales reps, most folks who travel on business do so only a few times a year; a goodly portion of these do so to gather en masse with their professional counterparts from around the country. They go to get out of the office for a few days, to see a strange city at company expense, to sit in group ennui during PowerPoint presentations, and to receive numerous sales pitches from vendors at exhibit booths.

Many people from many employers work the conventions, or benefit from the work done there.

There are the officers and year-round employees of the convention’s sponsoring entity (usually a business or professional association). There are the employees of professional convention-services companies—nomads who roam North America’s convention halls running registration desks, “lead retrieval” systems (see below), client-satisfaction surveys, etc.

There’s the Convention Center’s regular staff, cleaning rooms, operating video projectors, forklifting display-booth parts between the loading dock and the etc.

There are the various contractors and suppliers—caterers, catalog printers, sign printers, and such.

There are the restaurants, bars, hotels, cab drivers, and merchants in and around the Convention Center. There are the bus drivers who ferry groups of visitors to their hotels, to ancillary meeting venues, and to tourist attractions. There are the workers at the tourist attractions. (And, yeah, there are the strip clubs and escort services.)

There are the car-rental companies. There are the beneficiaries of car-rental taxes, includng the Seahawks and the Qwest Field staff.

There are the concierges and ushers, employed by the Seattle-King County Convention and Visitors Bureau (the fine folks who once bestowed us with the moniker “Emerald City,” and who now want our burg to be known as “Metronatural”).

And, under the concierge crew’s supervision, as many as 25 of us in the temp squad earn our pay by being dependable, being efficient, and being able to endure boring hours of either repetitive tasks or just sitting around looking authoritative.

With all this cash to be collected from out-of-town pockets, it’s no wonder states and municipalities kept outdoing one another in the 1980s and ’90s to build these taxpayer-supported shrines to business and the Business Class.

The convention biz has slumped since 9-11 and the resulting headaches of air travel, not to mention teleconferencing and online chats and other hi-tech alternatives. Yet, every year, thousands of people in hundreds of work-related “tribes” still feel a need to meet F2F and IRL. (That’s “face to face” and “in real life,” in ’90s chat-room lingo.)

My most recent gig there was a convention of surgical radiologists. Before that, I worked on the American Library Association’s confab. (From Willa Cather to catheters, all in one building.)

Most Convention Center events aren’t as exciting as that of the World Trade Organization in 1999. And most convention work is routine stuff, particularly the tasks assigned to the temps.

We stuff thousands of logo-encrusted backpacks full of promotional pens, CD-ROMs, T-shirts, umbrellas, ad flyers, convention catalogs, schedules, and last-minute addenda to the schedules.

We sit outside the center’s many big and small meeting rooms as “room monitors.” There, we pass out evaluation forms before sessions and collect them afterwards. In between, we regularly count the attendance, lest the fire marshals bust the whole convention over one overpopulated room. We answer questions and complaints from belligerent convention goers about intricacies of the convention’s schedule—or, as often the case, respond with a smiling “I’m sorry, I don’t know. The big booth on level 4 probably has someone who’ll know.”

We work for convention-service companies, disbursing “lead retrieval” machines to exhibit booths. (These are credit-card type readers that collect the demographic data of each attendee who swipes his/her registration card at an exhibitor’s booth.)

We stand behind the registration booths, assembling attendees’ badges and ticket packets while quickly explaining why they mustn’t misplace them; all while long sign-in lines are held up by one or two people whose pre-registration confirmations had been eaten by a computer somewhere.

My favorite moment in that regard was at a convention for ethnic-minority students from private high schools. While many convention goers are jaded and jet-lagged adults, these teens acted truly excited to be in a strange city with thousands of their peers. And, unlike some of the librarians and radiologists, they were visibly excited to receive their free backpacks.

I’ve learned to admire the vastness of even a middle-sized convention as a logistical operation, from signage to people-moving to the setup and teardown of exhibit booths.

And our Convention Center, even after the 2001 expansion, is but an average-sized facility of its type, at 200,000 square feet of exhibit space (not counting meeting rooms). The Las Vegas Convention Center, the world’s largest, holds 15 times that much floor space.

That’s an awful lot of lead retrieval machines to be handed out by a lot of temps.