Conventional Wisdom

(Historical Notes: I left this one deliberately vague at the time, both because it involved things I wasn’t personally around to witness and because it involved behind the scenes stuff with staff and I didn’t want to throw anybody under the bus.  I don’t really give a crap about the latter any more, and I’ve heard enough additional information about the former that I feel okay with shooting my mouth off.  Basically, when Kurt proposed the idea of turning the panel into a viewing party, the idea hinged on the fact that our panel was going to be the last thing in the room all night.  So who cares if the thing runs several hours later than planed?  Well, several people, it turns out, and that’s where the problem arose.  See, the liaison from panel ops that Kurt was talking to apparently just approved everything on his own, never bothering to actually check with the HEADS of panel ops or the MAGFest higher ups or, most importantly, the people at the hotel.  So as the night rolled on an the show started, we’re not even an hour in when the staffer keeping an eye on the room comes over and lets us know how much time we have left.  Turns out nobody had ever told him that we were going to be in there any latter than the scheduled panel time, which is a problem since SOMEBODY connected to staff would have to be on hand as long as something was going on in there.  And it was a BIGGER problem because, despite what the panel guy had assumed, there actually WAS something scheduled for the room after us.  Early morning was the one time the hotel staff could get in and clean up after us filthy degenerate nerds, and nobody had told THEM anything different was happening either.  And, of course, by this point, all the head staffers with the authority to make decisions had already gone to bed.  So, yeah, stress.

Now, as a testament to the perpetual state of barely-restrained disaster that MAGFest normally operates in, when the available staff and security guys DID show up, the question was never “Should we shut this thing down or now?” but rather “Obviously we’re NOT shutting this down, so how to we get away with it?”  After all, telling a room full of rowdy wrestling fans that they have to go home after just seeing the opening match would cause WAY more problems for everyone than it would solve.  I’m still not sure how they managed to keep the janitors at bay until we were done, but I know that the “staffer must be on duty” issue was resolved by drafting Kurt into the security team right there on the spot and chucking a vest at him.  Technically speaking, there was now an authority figure on hand.  It was an extremely sketchy and suspicious solution, and we’re all lucky nothing ELSE went wrong or it all would have blown up in our faces even worse, which is just about the most MAGFest thing possible.)