Saturday

I was doing good – I didn’t stand in the shower with that feeling of “Holy crap, I have to do this again?” I was up at 6:30 AM and downstairs by 7. I walked out of the stairwell to find…nothing. No hordes of artists waiting. Oh dear, this is not good. Thanks to Chris Johnson (jinxtigr) for holding down the fort until I got there, and sticking around while I talked with Rene about what happened. It turns out that the first of the artists started lining up sometime before 3:30 AM, and were lining up with pillows in hand. The hotel complained because they couldn’t clean with all of these people there, plus sleeping in the hallways is Definitely Not Cool from the hotel’s standpoint. To resolve this, the Dorsai went ahead and started taking down names at about 4 AM. When I went back to check, there were already 16 names on the overflow list. Oh boy.

I stuck around in front of the Dealer’s Room until about 8:30 and thought about possible alternatives for artists to secure tables. I went into the Alley and requested four more tables and set them up, with assistance from Brophey and Rasslor. We now could fit 72 artists into the Alley. Even so, after talking with Kage and Giza, we arrived at the same conclusion: we were going to have to go to a lottery system – take down the names of all of the artists who want a table, then draw numbers to see who actually gets a spot. This meant changing the rules in mid-convention, something that was a terrible idea. At the same time we couldn’t have a repeat of the previous night’s problems. I wrote up an announcement describing the rule changes and passed it by Giza and Kage and they seemed OK with it, so that’s what we went with. I distributed the rules changes to the artists in the Alley, and posted them outside of the Dealers Room. I also made allowances for people who wouldn’t hear about the changes by working with the Dorsai and making sure they knew what was going on and would instruct people properly, as well as planned to be at the Dealers Room by 7:30 AM to take more names then.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this chaos while I was in the Alley, Brophey ran out of register tape. OK, no problem, we had a spare roll – I popped it in. Then Rasslor started running out. I popped open the 10-pack of register tape, tried to put it in and…oh shit (those of you who attended Uncle Kage’s Story Hour should know where this is going). The register tape that Kage had purchased before the convention was 2 3/4″ wide. The register required 2 1/4″ wide register tape. Aiee! I volunteered to run out for more tape, with Giza’s directions, and Linnaeus graciously volunteered to join me. Thus began our two-and-a-half hour tour of northwestern Philadelphia suburbs, with stops in Ardmore, King of Prussia, Norristown, and Collegeville (!). In our absence, things apparently got worse as two registers ran out of tape, leaving one register to handle all Artists Alley sales. It must have been awful. I will credit Kage with resourcefulness, though – he came up with the idea of sawing down the too-wide tapes. The hotel workshop had a circular saw that did the trick (I find it disturbing that the workers there had actually done something similar before), and while it created a lot of nasty-smelling smoke, they were able to cut two rolls down to something serviceable and got things rolling again.

We got back about an hour and half before the Alley closed. I am here to tell you all, Takaza is a saint. I was stressed, torn in several different directions, and generally splattered. He organized people and made payout run properly while I talked with the artists, answered any questions they had about the rule changes, and hearing out their concerns and complaints. Total payout for Saturday was approximately $10,000.

I was totally drained after all of that, so I went back up to the room, had a beer, and relaxed. My roomies returned and we chatted for a couple of hours, just lazing about in the quiet of the well-air-conditioned room. We had heard a rumor that the story about the register tape would be in Uncle Kage’s Story Hour so we went down only to find the show already in progress. We stuck around for the rest and enjoyed it, although it turned out that the story we wanted to hear was what he opened the show with. Ah well.

We wandered over to Operations where Takaza, Chouette, and Linnaeus began talking about the newsletter they still had to put out that night. I realized that it was now 10 PM and I had eaten all of two scones the entire day. Data, Posi and I jumped into the car and brought McDonalds back for everyone. After dinner, I headed up to bed.