Conventional Wisdom

These days, pretty much every convention big enough to have a line problem at registration tries to alleviate said line by diverting as many people over to other places as possible… and there’s almost always a whole slew of NEW problems as a result, since inevitably most of the volunteers don’t actually know what the other check-in procedures even are.  Even then, though, that’s usually a case of three or four kids in a row having to go ask somebody else in so-and-so is allowed to enter through such-and-such door or whatever.  And then there’s whatever the heck was going on HERE.

I’m still not sure what the actual issue at Otakon’s presenter registration table even was, because I know that OTHER people I talked to were able to get in and out in no time.  I can only assume THOSE folks got a different shift of volunteer running the table, because the kids running things when I was there had NO idea what they were doing.  It wasn’t even that the line was all that long, so much as the fact that it was so frickin’ slow for no discernible reason, despite the whole point of bringing panelists in separately being to AVOID a line situation.  And yes, one of those kids actually did have to come chase us down afterwards because she’d forgotten to actually SCAN the QR code we waved in front of them to the single, solitary purpose of scanning.

Also, I don’t feel like the absurdity of the bit in the corner fully comes through in the finished version of this comic.  They had this release form thing everybody had to fill out, and after close to an hour of waiting, one of the folks got out of line and walked straight up to the table, grabbed a whole stack of the forms, and started handing them out to everybody in line to fill out while we waited.  Again, this was not a staffer or volunteer doing this, just some rando who knew how to do these people’s job better than they did.  CONVENTIONS!