Sick of Conventions

Oh, no, not "sick" as in "never want to attend one again," but "sick" as in "I seem to get ill almost every time I attend one." I thought I'd managed to avoid it this time. I washed my hands regularly. I drank a lot of water. I even got nearly enough sleep. All this seems to have done was postponed the inevitable, as I woke up this morning with the beginning of a cold, and as I sat here watching the World Cup 3rd-place game, I could feel the cold getting its hooks into me. I guess it just took a few days for the bug to incubate.

It's a good thing this is my "off" week. Oh, I have some work to do from my mundane job -- mainly to make my life easier next week, and because for a change they gave me enough notice of the task that I can get it done somewhat at my leisure rather than with someone breathing down my neck looking for an answer immediately -- but I don't have to go anywhere (other than to get some groceries) or do much of anything on a set schedule. I probably should write up the Westercon Business Meeting minutes, however. I sort of wish I'd done it during the convention, but Lisa got very unhappy about me spending so much time over the computer during a convention; however, the longer I wait, the harder the job will be.

I enjoyed that 3rd-place game. With much less on the line, the teams actually got out there and played rather than sitting back and playing nothing but defense and banking on a penalty-kick shootout. Bad luck to Portugal to score an own-goal -- without that the last few minutes would have been even more exciting when Portugal scored their first goal. The home-team crowd were happy, although they of course would have been happier if their boys had been in tomorrow's game instead.

My predictions made a few days ago obviously got shot to pieces. Shows you how much I know about soccer.

A Blast from the Past

While searching for something else, I stumbled across this Interaction review that I don't recall seeing the first time around. I added some of my own comments to it, particularly the sections that personally mentioned me or over which I had some management control. I don't mind people saying that I talked too much -- I usually do. However, in the case cited, if it hadn't been me making the announcements, then someone else would have needed to do so.

The posting and the discussion of it, however, reinforces what should be obvious that it is utterly impossible to satisfy everyone with a Worldcon. Interaction was, in my opinion, one of the best-planned, best-organized Worldcons I've ever attended, and I'm not just saying that because I was a division manager. Actually, being a DM means that I could see how well organized it was from the inside. Yet we still have people saying how badly organized it was for this reason or that. And I'm convinced that if we'd made the areas about which there were complaints better, it would have caused something else to fail.

The specific example over which I had some control was the "care and feeding of your Hugo Award trophy" speech that is a fairly common part of the pre-Hugo Award reception. The complaint was that "only about fourteen people in the room need to know this anyway" and "just give us a handout after the ceremony if we win and we can read about it." My response was, "People don't read handouts, and much of this was stuff you needed to know before you held the trophy." Hugo trophies are heavier than they look. The rockets are not, as some people think, hollow, but are solid zinc castings with a chrome plating. Zinc is heavy. We don't want a winner to drop the trophy or do anything foolish that could possibly break it. Most of the trophies are not that fragile (some have been), but grabbing it by the rocket and swinging it around over your head, for example, is probably not a good idea -- there's too much lever action going on between the trophy and its base. And this is about the only time we'll get to talk to the Hugo Award winners as a group, and while, yes, they're mixed in with a larger crowd of people who will never hold one, we need to take this opportunity to tell them because otherwise we're not doing our jobs as planners.

And if we repeated a few of the messages multiple times, that's because the messages were sufficiently important that we couldn't afford not to saturate people with them. In particular, I was worried that we'd get at least one Hugo winner who would wander off after the ceremony instead of coming to the Forth Room for the photo session. Therefore, we needed to be absolutely certain that not only did the potential winners know what was happening, but also everyone else around them, so that none of them would allow the dazed winner to wander away.

Unfortunately, some of this knowledge has been gained over time and painful experience. If you've never been involved in a Hugo Awards ceremony or the pre-ceremony reception, you're unlikely to know any of this. But if we did not take these precautions and someone broke their trophy (or their toes), then we the organizers would be chastised for not taking proper precautions. Once again, you can't win. You can only do the best you know how, and hope that nothing goes wrong.

Giving Myself the Business

Business Meeting, that is. Although I was not feeling well enough to get out and do any errands or get any exercise, I did manage to write up the minutes of the Westercon Business Meeting and prepare the Bylaws/Standing Rules/Draft Agenda to pass on to Gnomeward Bound/Westercon 60. (Westercon 60's web site has now been updated reflect the new dates and site, by the way.)

I sent it off to Business Meeting Chairman edgreen86 and Ed turned around and approved it in a few hours. I then made HTML and PDF versions (the former through the ugly WinWord converter, yes I know it's bad) and sent the lot of six files off to Kent Bloom, Chairman of next year's meeting, and jbriggs, who among other things can update the Westercon web site.

With the other things I have coming up this summer (ConStruction, the SFSFC board of directors meeting, and L.A.con IV), I really needed to get the Westercon stuff behind me. If I had not done it this weekend, there was a good chance I might not have gotten to it until sometime this fall!