An [E]xcellent Week in Review (Part 2)
I’m a dirty, dirty liar. Sorry about that, everyone. In my defense, I was running on maybe an hour of sleep in the preceding 36 hours last night, so it’s not totally unreasonable that I made a mistake. The Joystiq panel dinosaur incident happened on Friday night, not Saturday, so really my first day was even more entertaining than I originally indicated. I guess it also means that Friday had a double lesson. A double lesson, what does it mean?? (Sorry, old joke, but it was just too easy to not take.) Anyway, shall we continue?
Saturday (PAX Day 2): So what really happened on Saturday? The Expo Hall had it’s media hour before it was open to the public, and due to my assistance helping out with Valve’s lines the previous day, they let me sit in on one of the Portal 2 demonstrations that attendees would wait in line for up to an hour to see. I was going to buy the game anyway, but those 10-15 minutes made me want it even more. Fortunately it comes out in just over a month, so the wait won’t be too unbearable.
Later on in the day (at least I’m pretty sure it was that day, but who really knows at this point?) I remember that we had some pretty intense line management going on for some of the panels. The theater could hold about 650 people, but there was only enough room in the hallway outside to line up about 200. We had an otherwise empty room slightly down the hall from us where we could put another 200, but for the super popular panels, that still left us to improvise where to line up another third of our capacity. It also didn’t help matters that our theater/hallway was also right in the path of the line that would form for events taking place in the main theater (probably once they got up to 1000 people or so), and we had to be pretty mindful of that lest our line be completely decimated by the throng of people waiting to see the concerts or whatever else was about to be going on. However, for every panel we had that we absolutely packed the theater for, there were a couple that we had absolutely no problem at all doing line management for.
Saturday Lesson (the real one): Main theater lines are a force to be reckoned with. If the main theater line starts coming, you move your other line if you want it to still exist in any manageable fashion.
Sunday (PAX Day 3): Usually my days at PAX would go until 9, but since Sunday was the last day, everything shut down around 6. That meant I spent my full amount of time as normal in the Expo Hall, during which I was once again hanging around Valve and got probably my favorite piece of swag from the whole event (a Portal 2 shirt). My satellite theater job, however, only lasted for three hours and just a single, extremely unimpressive line to deal with. Once the event was officially over an done, the reverse process of setup occurred. Once all the A/V stuff from our theater was packed up, I returned back to what I called “my favorite group that I didn’t work for” and helped CFP with their disassembly and packing work since it wasn’t insignificant by any stretch of the imagination. The hundred or so TVs that were set up had to all be disassembled, all the game consoles and controllers had to be packed back into bins, and it all had to be done in a way so that everything was accounted for and labeled properly.
Sunday Lesson: While teardown does go faster than setup, taking apart an entire room of TVs isn’t an insignificant task. Having the “TV brigade” (my term, I wasn’t one of them though) of about 10 people all doing it at once definitely helps matters though.
Monday: After three or four consecutive days of waking up by 8 at the latest (and Sunday morning also needing to deal with the DST change), I slept in for as absolutely long as I could Monday morning. Once I did manage to wake up, I spent the day just relaxing in preparation for the afterparty later that evening. I sought out Faneuil Hall to complete my weathervane task (it’s a grasshopper, and I got my achievement for it), but considering it was snowing at the time, hanging around outside wasn’t my idea of a great way to spend the day. Instead, I decided to go kill a couple hours by going to a movie theater to see I Am Number Four. (I know, there’s a movie review in here also! What doesn’t this post have?) Decent, not amazing; I always was left feeling like there was the potential for it to have a little extra boost and become really good, but it never quite got there. Unless it becomes a series (which is possible given the ending), I probably can live with just Netflixing it. My score: 7/10.
Right, back to PAX stuff. The afterparty was at a place called ”The Greatest Bar” (really, that’s it’s actual name), a four story bar that was a much better venue overall than the Hard Rock Café was for the Prime 2010 afterparty. In true gaming convention fashion, we took over the largest screen on the wall that showed sports stuff, hooked up a 360, and people were playing Marvel vs Capcom 3 on it from the balcony all night long. In decreasing order of area for playing, there was also Rock Band and FIFA set up, sort of the inverse of the importance of games you’d find in a bar given any other audience of people.
Monday Lesson: You feel like you meet so many new people over the course of the weekend, and then when you get to the afterparty, you realize that you’re lucky to even know 5-10% of the people there.
Tuesday: Ahhh, Tuesday. The day started off about as early as it could with me calling American Airlines at 12:40 to inquire about my flight change. For $50, they happily adjusted my reservation to have me fly out of Boston to Chicago at 6:00 (opposed to 12:40), switch planes there, and then be back in Seattle at about 11:05 or so. At this point, I’m thinking my day is going to be easy. With only five hours until my flight I didn’t really want to fall asleep and risk not being woken up by my alarm, so I went ahead and headed to the airport thinking that if I slept an hour so so at the gate, the relative uncomfortableness and level of noise would be sure to wake me up. At this point is when my day started to fall apart.
Upon arriving at the airport, I had two (or depending on how you want to count, three) problems. First, something was strange in American’s reservation system, and when I tried to check into my flight, I actually got checked into my original flight rather than my adjusted one. However, the system knew not to give me a boarding pass for that flight, so it just spit out a piece of paper at me saying to go see a ticket agent. Problem, it’s 1:00 in the morning; no ticket agents are around, and none show up until 3:30. Also, even if I had been able to get my boarding pass, the security checkpoint was closed until 4:00. Effectively this meant than I had two hours or so to burn during which I really didn’t want to fall asleep, so I entertained myself by watching a movie on my Zune. Once 3:30 rolled around, a surprisingly large number of people had gotten in line to see the ticket agent with baggage to check, so I went back to the self service machine just to try one last time. Fortunately the system worked right this time around, so I got my boarding passes without hassle. Wait a little while longer, get through security, and now, finally, maybe I could sleep for an hour. Haha, nope.
As soon as I get through security, I looked at the departure monitor to verify my gate (why? I’m not really sure, I had just seen my gate assignment 20 minutes before when I got my boarding pass), and discover that, oh hey, my flight to Chicago is cancelled. Not delayed, not rescheduled, flat out cancelled. Uhhhh…ok? It’s still way too early in the morning for there to be any gate agents around, so I call the reservations people on the phone to figure out what’s up. I never got an answer as to why the flight to Chicago was cancelled, but they had already rebooked me on another flight leaving at 6:00. With this most recent change, it just so happened that I was going to be flying the incredibly direct route of Boston to Seattle via DFW. It was around this time where my brain went into the mode of “fly me to Seattle through London if you want, I don’t care anymore, just get me there”. Through some amount of foresight there were also machines to print out my new set of boarding passes in the American gate area, and then 12 hours later (4 AM Boston time to 1 PM Seattle time), I actually managed to get back to where I wanted to be.
After all of this, I was finally able to get to the Sounders game which was fun, but unfortunately not quite as fun as it could have been with the rain and the fact that the Sounders lost. Once I got home from that I took a short rest before beginning writing my post yesterday, and well, you know where the story goes from there.
Tuesday Lesson: Remember how I said before that Chicago didn’t want me flying through it this weekend? In the future, I’ll remember this series of events and will do anything in my power to never fly through there again lest any more fun surprises pop up.