I (barely) survived Chicon 7 - Part 1

Monday - Worked an 11-hour day to make up time for later in the week.  At lunch I deposited my paycheck and got a cashier’s check for the final $166 that I took downtown after work to drop off with the doorman at my Bankruptcy Attorney’s building.  That was the final step we were waiting on to file.  You know, because I didn’t have enough stuff to do this week...

Tuesday - worked 8:30-3 then headed to the Hyatt to start work. Mostly organizational stuff - making sure that each pile was labeled and sending it off to it’s designated home as gophers appeared.  Began sending out grid to set up on party floors.  Was not specific enough about which tower I was talking about - these things happen when you are stepping into a job you have no experience in - so they had to go looking for them around 10PM after I left for home.

Wednesday - Worked 8:30-3 again.  At lunch I got the pile of signature forms for the bankruptcy so I signed and sent all of those.  Then after work I headed down to find that the ConSuite truck was 3 hours late.  This was the start of a pattern for the weekend, when that department was consistently 2-3 hours late on every time frame they gave us.  I know they were busy but this really caused a LOT of problems for us.  

Also discovered that Lisa had had to fire our ONE staff member who wasn’t specifically a truck driver.  After the 6-hr smoke break, leaving without telling anyone on Tuesday, and not showing up for the one time-specific thing we had asked him to handle on Wednesday, we’re done.  When it’s 3 days into prep and I as the department Second have yet to actually meet you?  Yeah - get lost.

After a pretty intense load-in I came above-ground to a message from a friend who was crashing at my place prior to the con after driving in from CA.  Apparently he had managed to pull the doorknob off the bathroom door and drop it down the toilet while it was flushing.  So at 11:00 at night, I was in the hallway of my condo with my hand up the back of the toilet.  Yay.  I couldn’t get to it, even after disconnecting it and popping it off the bolts.  So I had to take him back down to the hotel with me that night to crash on a cot in our room because my place had no functioning bathroom.  So I finished packing at the last minute and forgot a fair amount of stuff, and got to the hotel well after midnight to crash and burn.

Yeah - and the con hasn’t even started yet....