phi

Met up with Julia at 10 this morning and headed to Haverhill for an Arisia art show worksession. Julia had some inventory to do and a meeting to take, and I started on the pegboard.

Some time ago Arisia changed from attaching pairs of pegboard together with zip ties (which we then removed every year) to using heavy duty braided picture wire. A while after that we made some more pairs at a worksession where we were also doing a lot of other work, and I didn't supervise the assembly as well as I should have. A little ways in I noticed some of the assembly being done in a way that could come loose, and got everyone doing it so that it wouldn't, but a few got through and stayed that way for the years since.

So my first task was to find the bad pairs and redo them. There turned out to be three of these. I also sorted pegboard by color and restacked it so that it wouldn't be damaged in transit.

Arisia has two different shades of brown pegboard, and we try to split the show so that one part can be one color and one the other without the difference being noticeable. In the new hotel that split comes out differently from what we've been doing, so we needed to make some more pairs of the darker color (we have quite a bit of unpaired pegboard). This takes a lot longer than checking or restacking pegboard, but I got started, and then when Julia was done with her stuff she joined in. We made a lot of pairs, but only had barely enough wire for the currently planned layout, with one pair to spare.

There are ways to hang pegboards that aren't attached together, and we have zip ties to make pairs the old way, so we packed a few more pegboards into the carts just in case. After all, there may still be small changes to the layout, or damage to pegboard in transit.

So now the pegboard is all nicely packaged up and tagged to go to the convention, along with the other Art Show stuff. And I have a cooking project to play with and a new desk to put together.

Art Show is one of the things in Arisia that has the most post-con work to do -- in most years it is 50 hours or so, not that I have been tracking it super closely. I've finished the biggest chunk, which is to get our accounting of which pieces sold to the point where it can be reviewed by Treasury and compared to the money we took in. Hopefully we'll be able to get checks out tomorrow when our Treasurer and I meet to go over the data. There is still a debrief to write and email to send out and webpages to update. But the little light at the end of the tunnel is appreciably larger every day. Maybe I'll even pick up the blogging now that everyone else seems to be doing that here. Not that I did all that much of it even back when it was the only game in town.

Arisia worksession tonight. Two of my best volunteers showed up and the three of us got what I thought would be eight task hours of work done in two and a half hours. That was a lot of fun, and we're much closer to ready for the convention now.

Over the last three worksessions, at Arisia storage (as with this one) and at NESFA, we have gone through all 750 or so pieces of pegboard in Boston and selected the 293 in the best shape to come to the convention. Of these, 287 belong to Arisia and 6 belong to NESFA. I had been thinking it would be a good idea to merge the two collections. But now that I've seen the condition of NESFA's pegboard I don't think that's a good idea any more.

I'm still grateful to NESFA for allowing me to cherry pick their pegboard, though. Those six pieces match some of ours in color and mean that we'll have enough of that color to do an entire section and not have to worry about it being next to a color that doesn't match.

Day 8 by one reckoning, and the first supernumerary day by the other. Either way, the last day of daily updates.

At some point last night, some food functions people dropped off an enormous pile of food, explaining that it was breakfast for the Art Show staff. It was vastly too much food for the five or so people we were expecting, and it was all crap anyway, so we sent it back. This morning I got downstairs for my 8am call to find that it (and some less-unhealthy stuff) had been set back up overnight, squarely in the way of where we were going to need to work, with the explanation that it was breakfast for the entire staff. Kerry had gotten it moved to a less dumb place in the room but was irked that no one had asked or indeed even mentioned that this was going to happen. And of course none of the staff had any idea it was coming, so we'd all had breakfast before coming downstairs. Of the well over 100 pounds of food we managed to consume probably a quart of orange juice before the food services people decided that breakfast time was over and that they needed the coolers and such to go on a truck. This pretty much typifies communication at this Worldcon. There aren't any cons in Chicago that need a staff of more than 50, and indeed few of the home cons of anyone working on Chicon 7 are that large. People, and especially upper management, expect information to propagate by osmosis, because that's how it works when you have a staff of no more than 50. But it's not how it works for a Worldcon, and Arisia would do well to check that we're being explicit enough in our communication as we grow.

We were planned to get four carpenters and two electricians at 8:00. In fact we got two of each. One of the carps was totally awesome, better even than the setup carps. The other was inefficient and surly. So I put the awesome one on taking down spines since that requires interacting with volunteers a lot, and then on taking electrical boxes off of helicopter arms since that's done to only some of the arms, and then on disassembling the electrical trees since there's a right way and a wrong way. The other guy got to take A-frames apart. I set the electricians to taking down lightbulbs and disassembling the rear end cap light fixtures, and gave them helpers to put the lightbulbs in boxes. They unplugged the helicopter arms unbidden, but took off without unplugging the electrical trees or the front endcap fixtures. I waited a while for them to come back in case they were on break but they never did so I just had volunteers do that so we could get the spines down. Not that I really thought they were on break after only half an hour of work.

I had plenty of volunteers to sort pipe and kee klamps, and the union folks stuck around for a little while to put electrical trees in the coffin and a few other things -- I think they hadn't hit their minimum, and even if they had the one carpenter was awesome enough and my volunteers tired enough that it'd have been worth paying him. By 10:00 everything from the Art Show was ready to go and I sent everyone but one volunteer off to help with other things, the rest of logistics now being behind two eight balls instead of only one. But that's another story.

Around this time some folks from the show after us came in to see if they could drop off some fastfolds. I told them fine, as it wasn't in the way and anyway I was pretty sure our teamsters were going to gaily ignore our noon deadline just as our electricians had gaily ignored our circuit game earlier, so I might as well let them ignore the pickup time too. This progressed immediately to setting up the fastfolds, which they started to do right in front of my pallets where the teamsters would have to drive their forklift to get them out of the room. But they were willing to move over and set up not in front of the pallets when I insisted, even knowing as I'm sure they did that there was no way the teamsters were going to be there on time, being as how they shared with the setup electricians a total freedom from arbitrary hotel rules.

Kim from Logistics and I spent another hour or 90 minutes putting some last minute treasury boxes on the pallets, and tie strapping and pallet wrapping everything, and putting a few more pieces of paperwork together. At 11:30, just as I was finishing the last of the paperwork, a couple of teamsters came in, looked around approvingly, and said they'd be back at 12:30. I headed upstairs and got lunch with Eugene and Crystal and Lucky, and then Crystal and Lucky headed for the airport and Eugene and I went upstairs to grab the last of our stuff from the room. We got down and checked out at 12:58 on a 1:00 late checkout and settled the bill. I'd joined Hyatt Gold Passport on this trip to get a week worth of free wifi and sure enough there was no charge for internet access on the bill. I put my suitcase in the back check that the hotel had set up on the skybridge and spent most of the next couple of hours hanging out in the lobby, punctuated by checking to see if the teamsters had moved anything in the Art Show. I'm not really sure why I bothered as I knew the con had dragooned the teamsters to help them load their truck, but it made me feel better to see that the incoming group, despite now legitimately having the space, had not managed to hide my pallets behind anything especially large.

I love the move-in/move-out days of a convention. I'm often working, often hard, but I also often have time for great conversations, and so do the people I want to have conversations with. Besides Eugene and Caycee, I had a long conversation with Dave Cantor. He's the second person in the last month to try to convince me to join MCFI, and I laid out what I think the problem with MCFI is: Mark and Priscilla Olson. (Priscilla, if you're reading this, the backstory of why I think you are the problem is in an unlocked post about six years ago, but I'm writing this on an airplane so I'm not able to go find the link.) I don't think MCFI is really going to be able to dilute Mark and Priscilla away. There's some chance a new member of MCFI might piss them off enough that they stormed off in a huff the way they have done with Boskone, but I don't think I am that new member, and I don't think that MCFI is likely to offer membership to someone like Crystal who is. We also chatted about a bunch of other things and I have a lot of food for thought, particularly as to whether it is a good idea to sign up for things -- like taking on the title of assistant Art Show director at Chicon -- that I can only give partial attention to. I did this with Cashier in Montreal, really, in that I counted on my staff and the Treasurer to handle the last bank run. Perhaps it is better to agree only to the things I can follow all the way through on, even if I think having part of my attention would be better than having all of the alternative. (This was certainly true for assistant ASD, the alternative being leaving the position empty.)

I didn't really have much to do after Dave went off to get ready for dinner with his Chicago cousins, but I ran downstairs to check on the Art Show one more time. Most of the stuff was out of the room, including two of the pallets. A couple of teamsters were trying and failing to get one of those into the freight elevator on a motorized pallet jack, and nearly managed to tip it over trying. Really? This is not rocket science. They eventually gave up and went in search of a manual jack. Unimpressed as I was, there was only one useful thing for me to do and that was get the hell out of the way, so I headed out to the airport. I got there a few minutes before checked-baggage closing time for my flight, so that made me less nervous even though I'd known it was going to be delayed. Having left behind some things that came out to Chicago with me, my bag was down to 48 pounds from 49.8, so it got another HEAVY tag. There's a reasonably good non-chain greek restaurant airside at MDW so I had a little bit of dinner, and a bit of computer time too. In the end the flight took off a little more than two hours late, and my seatmate offered me a free drink coupon. And on that note I think I'm going to close my Worldcon blog experiment and finish my drink.

Day, um. 6, or 4. They have started to blur together.

This was Arisia party night, and also Art Show auction day. Got up in the morning and printed up some party flyers with the room numbers and put them on all of the message boards. Started to gather up party material and clean up the room, and delegated a bunch of party tasks to all of my fantastic helpers. Then I got a text that Circlet Press was offering the use of their suite. Awesome! And scary, because the last time that happened, at LAcon, we suddenly had to go buy a lot more groceries and dragoon people into party duty and all in all it only worked because we had a dozen people available to staff the party. But this is a smaller suite than that, and the newsletter had not gone to press with the room number yet, and it would have the side-effect of making there be a place for my still somewhat ill roommate to hide if he needed it (which, happily, he turned out not to). So after some dithering I accepted the offer, and sent off a bunch of texts to everyone affected. All this happening just as Art Show was getting busy was less than ideal and I bet Kerry thinks I am goldbricking. But I was able to help with closing bids, and a little with data entry.

By the time I actually made it up to the party suite it was nearly ready to go, and we opened the doors a few minutes early. At the very beginning the crowds came and went quickly, and the oscillation between super-crowded and nearly empty reminded me of a pulsejet. But things smoothed out and for the rest of the evening we had a great buzz going on without being intimidating. At any given time we typically had two and a half people working, so I sat the desk and served booze and sold memberships, and other people put out food and talked up the con, and we didn't bother with a door dragon.

The layout of this particular suite made running a party easier than it would have been in a guest room, and we had the right amount of food. Thanks especially to the Commonwealth party who gave us all the beverages we needed. No thanks to whoever "helpfully" donated the great big tote of useless crap just as we opened so that they wouldn't have to haul it to the dead dog themselves. I should have told them to haul it down there themselves.

We had a weird rush of memberships right around midnight. At one point we had a line to register! The Square app was great and people were impressed with how good their signatures looked on my iPad with the stylus. In the end we sold 27 memberships.

The plan had been to stay open until 2. But the party was going strong and the room hosts seemed OK with it so we wound up closing the doors to new partiers around 2:30, and didn't finish cleaning up and kicking people out until nearly 3. Good thing Monday isn't an early morning for me.

Day 3, or 1: in which my numbering begins to match anyone else's.

Got up at a relatively leisurely hour, had some breakfast at the now open staff den, and headed down to the art show to make sure everything was going well there. We did need to dip into the peg hooks I'd bought, but didn't run out. Plan A for where to put the empty road cases didn't pan out but there was a room set aside for storing empty mail in art boxes so we put them there. That whole process took a while since logistics was still behind the eight ball, so there were still some boxes in the room when we opened to the public at 1:00. Fortunately the room is pretty big and there we're still artists checking in so it didn't look unintentional.

Eugene and Caycee and Johnny showed up in the early afternoon and I spent quite some time smoffing with them, and especially with Eugene. Then having exhausted Eugene I went up to the Mnstf party where I found Michael Lee and spent another couple of hours smoffing with him and some other Minneapolis folks. Also stopped in at the very impressive UK bid party where Lia poured me a beer I hadnt had before, the Kansas City speakeasy party which was a fun concept, and the Circlet Press party where I arranged to borrow the same knife and cutting board that Arisia borrowed from Cecilia at Wiscon.

I am starting to collect notes on things to bring back to Arisia's process. So far they're mostly minor touches, but those matter too and they're easy to do.

One thing that of course people talk about at Worldcon is Worldcons. I have a new perspective on why Minneapolis doesn't want to run one: it's just too close on the calendar to Convergence. Being in the other direction but about the same distance on the calendar as Arisia it's just too scary to contemplate wedging a Worldcon in. And skipping a year seems to have worked out pretty poorly for cons like Philcon and Archon that tried to do it that way. Maybe this is the real reason for a carpetbag bid. Or maybe the answer is more calendar flexibility for Worldcons.

Day 1. Or day -2, depending on your point of view. Got up at 5 after not enough sleep and hit good connections on the T to the airport. Checked a bag that weighed 49.8 pounds -- had it gone over I could have split it (this being Southwest) or moved some things to my carryon, but I enjoyed getting a red and white striped HEAVY bag tag for my collection without having to pay for it. MDW is also a new airport for me, so that's fun.

Riding the L in to town from the airport I was reminded of a recent conversation with mangosteen about how Gotham in the most recent Batman movies has a lot of Chicago in it. The architecture is certainly right, even if the whole Gotham-as-an-island thing is wrong. There are gargoyles everywhere. But what I most loved is how rail oriented the place is. The L runs in from Midway along a 6 track main line. Six! The drawbridges are gorgeous, some with great serpentine rack and pinion mechanisms, some with enormous counterweight towers. Tons of industrial space, some still apparently in use making incredibly toxic products, and some converted to oh so hip looking loft space.

Went straight to the Art Show and commenced marshalling volunteers to feed work to the two union carpenters who're the only ones who can tighten screws in the show. We had them from noon to 4 and they were great. I think I did an OK job getting things ready for their arrival, and giving them and the volunteers tasks. As usual we had a great surplus of volunteers which made life easy if sometimes frustratingly unbusy for them, and also kind of annoyed the union boss who thought with all of these people we must have been cheating somehow on who was doing what. But when it came time to stand the A frames up it was great to have them. By 4:00 we were ready to hang pegboard on the six spines of pipe, most of the extension cord flyovers were up, and most of the light fixtures and supports were up too. There's a little more pipe assembly for the carpenters in the morning, plus they'll be the ones to actually attach the pegboard sandwiches. And we get electricians in the morning too, to install the bulbs and circuit the show and install the one fixture per spine that's just a fixture and no pipe.

I was trying to be clean about not doing *any* work myself and only delegating things to volunteers and/or paid staff, which of course I am terrible at, but it was good practice and I think I got a little better at it. With workers on the clock I needed to be 100% on keeping the hopper full and not worrying about how little time it saved me. And it seems to have been pretty educational for most of the volunteers. Sending a volunteer off to fetch me a yogurt to keep my blood sugar up was probably the best delegating I did all day, but it's going to take me a little while to get used to that kind of delegating being OK.

I honestly don't think I'd mind working with a hypothetical all-paid crew if we only had to pay them their living wage, and not the 300% markup that the various intermediaries add to it.

After the union folks left I handed off arranging pegboard to Kerry, checked into my room, and then went looking for a very late lunch, my previous meal having been nine hours earlier, airside at Logan. Had a burger with John and Peggy Rae Sapienza, which was pretty awesome, and we chatted about conrunning and Worldcons and one of her upcoming panel topics which was quite interesting. Poked my nose back into the Art Show for a bit and puttered around with some cleanup (the volunteers all having gone off for the evening), and then headed to bar in the hotel atrium where I ran into Mem Morman and Kent Bloom and chatted with them for a bit, which was also awesome. I will have to remember that just as I enjoy the early setup phases of Arisia, showing up early to Worldcons and NASFiCs gets me neat conversations.

This hotel is physically just about the perfect Worldcon venue. It's easily big enough, but laid out compactly enough to run into people. Function space is nicely stacked and the two sides of the hotel connect better than I expected. The city outside runs 24/7 and any service you could desire is close at hand. I haven't looked into the neighborhood but there are plenty of good and not terribly overpriced food options in the hotel. The lobby atrium provides a social nexus. It makes me want to see a Worldcon in the Peabody Orlando, to see how it would compare. Do you hear me, Mr. Beaton?