FRIDAY, JUNE 27, 2008
I was up at 7 AM and ready to finish up the setup for Artists Alley. I grabbed a muffin from the Brown Bag Deli and walked over to Hall C, the first person in there as usual. I called up the merchant services help desk and they walked me through getting the credit card terminal properly programmed. Oddly, they used the exact same steps we had been using, but this time it worked. Go fig.
Once I got that straightened out, my staff started filtering in for a quick training session. I ran through how the registers worked a few times, then let Rooth repeat the training for the latecomers while I prepped things for signup. At 10 AM, it was off to Rooms 303-305 for signups. When we got there, the room had a huge number of artists there. All told we signed up 131 artists for 114 seats that first day. We had to run the lottery, but thanks to Rooth’s refinements on my kludge-y spreadsheets, everything ran smoothly.
The one thing that did not go smoothly is that between reviewing the Alley rules and calling 114 names, it was after 12:00 PM when we finished, and the Alley was supposed to open at noon! We hustled down to Hall C and found that sales had already started and people seemed to be happy with how things were going. Have I mentioned how much I love my staff? They rock, every single one of ’em.
Everything ran smoothly for the first hour or so until we hit our first problem. The credit card terminal completely and utterly dumped its programming! While takaza brought out manual credit card swipers I got on the phone with the help desk and diagnosed the problem. We had to re-download all of the programming, a process that took 45 minutes. In this time the lines started building and really never went down for the rest of the afternoon. We had about 20 people in line in front of each register, and the lines extended back into the Alley and even between tables, behind artists. It was bad. Fortunately, my staff kept their cool and things just chugged along.
At the end of the day it was time to implement the new payout procedure. And it was awesome! We were able to pay all the artists in less than 40 minutes. And we didn’t just pay them a little – we paid out $19,000 that first day! Rooth and I worked on cleaning up the Alley and getting everything reset for the next day, a process that took until almost 7 PM. I followed Hartree, and Dan back to Operations where I hung out with them a bit as they worked on sorting through the day’s cash. I ordered a couple of pizzas for us and Linnaeus from the always-reliable Ephesus Pizza, which we brought up to the room after Dan was done. We ate the pizza in the quiet of our room and relaxed for a while, then it was bedtime for me.
Have to love technology, it knows the best times to fail.
HEHE Maybe next year i can Give you a Hand wit the Stuff….