Conventional Wisdom

I mashed several potential comic ideas into one here, and some context may have gotten lost in the shuffle.

In the first panel, the problem with the disc player in question is that the designers, in their infinite wisdom, built a device with NO BUTTONS ON IT other than than on/off and open/close.  All other commands had to come through a remote, including play.  So even though it could still read the discs just fine, there was no way to navigate the menu and actually start the program without an external remote… which it couldn’t receive signals from.  As for the botched delivery part, I still don’t really know what happened there, other than it’s somehow NOT the worst convention delivery screw-up I’ve seen.

As for the second, as tempting as it would be for me to just say “Well, that’s what happens when you commit the unpardonable sin of trying to own a motor vehicle in the DC area,” the real kicker was the trailer.  Because there was NO was all the gear for the museum was making it up to the convention center in the back of somebody’s car, most of it had to be stashed in a U-Haul and dragged up that way.  It worked great in terms of actually moving the stuff, but actually finding the space to stash the thing in the city turned out to be a whole adventure unto itself.  An adventure I was only privy to second-hand, but yes: it did apparently involve somebody trying to close the exit to a lot, AFTER insisting the that trailer had to leave.  The words “this would make a great Convention Wisdom comic” were uttered, and that is RARELY a good thing.

For the record, though, my genre savvy fears turned out to be MOSTLY unwarranted.  While I had plenty of minor annoyances over the weekend, none of it ever actually completed the trifecta like I’d feared.  I’ve actually dodged this bullet before… which I guess means I’m due for something to finally hit, huh?