So let’s pick up with the Anthrocon report where we left off, on Thursday morning.

THURSDAY, JUNE 26, 2008

Busy day of setup today! I tried to sleep in, setting the alarm for 8 AM. Naturally, I failed miserably, waking up at 7 AM. Ah well. I showered, and then watched some TV while Dan got ready. We picked up some breakfast at the Brown Bag Deli (which, alas, lacked the nifty furry theming they have had in the past) and stopped by Operations to see what was up.

Our first meeting of the day was with the David L. Lawrence Convention Center (DLCC) staff. They rolled out the red carpet for us, with Levy Restaurants (which operates the concession stands) providing a nice spread, replete with breakfast burritos. That meeting went well (mainly a lot of reviewing expectations and putting faces with names), and was followed right after by a similar meeting with the Westin Pittsburgh Convention Center staff.

We wrapped everything up at around 11 AM, and then it was time to start setting up in earnest. We recruited some volunteers from Operations who helped us carry over the registers as well as a few other important items from Ops to the DLCC. We then spent the afternoon programming cash registers, getting the Con Store stock in order and ready to go, and generally getting the Alley ready for the first artist to walk in and sit down.

Rooth and I worked on getting the credit card terminal working for a while and had a lot of problems. We just couldn’t get it to stop appending a 9 when dialing, which was needed since we had a direct-dial phone line. I had to leave at 5:30 PM, but Rooth stayed behind to continue working to fix it.

Dan and I headed back to our room, running a little later than I would have liked, and grabbed quick showers since Hall C was not air conditioned yet. After getting into some clothes that were a little more formal, we went down to the private dining room at The Original Fish Market in the hotel lobby where we joined the Anthrocon Board of Directors for dinner with their “Guest of OK”, Floyd Norman. (Floyd is a very humble guy and hated the idea of being a Guest of Honor. “Honor” was too much, but “OK” was good enough.)

The dinner was excellent, but the company was even better. Floyd and his lovely and talented wife, Adrienne Brown, were excellent conversationalists, and had some really amazing stories to tell. Floyd was the first African-American animator at Walt Disney Studios in the 1950’s and worked with them off and on through the production Mulan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, most notably on movies such as The Jungle Book and Robin Hood. Adrienne still works for Disney as an illustrator. Between them they described a fascinating company with two very different management styles. By Floyd’s description, Walt Disney was a larger-then-life, hands-on manager who gave the company his own very unique viewpoint and culture. The Disney of today is more of a standard American corporation, for good or for ill.

Dinner went on for almost two and a half hours, and I would have loved to have heard more from Floyd and Adrienne, but we had an all-staff meeting to go to. That meeting went as it does every year, meandering a bit, though it was notable that Rama asked if there was an inclement weather plan for the convention given that the weather was supposed to be a little wild that weekend. No plan was in place, but it was assumed that whatever the Westin and the DLCC had would be fine for us.

The meeting wrapped up at around 11 PM, and I went off to bed not long after.