Conventional Wisdom

Okay, so time for a little story. One of the panels I really wanted to attend was the Dominic Deegan Q&A panel. Like everyone else who came by his table, I was told by Mookie that the panel would be at 7pm. That was, after all, what the schedule everyone received said. Well, some time Saturday morning, a Katsucon demi-god decided to bump that panel BACK to 5, meaning that pretty much everyone why actually wanted to SEE it lined up two hours late (it also meant that the panel was given to a bunch of people waiting for the Funimation industry panel to start) Now, here’s where the story gets neat. Mookie came down to the room at 7, if only to apologize to everyone who missed the time change. That’s a nice gesture in itself, but soon he was talking to the nearby staffers about taking over a different room to do a SECOND panel. Eventually, after much running around and talking into walkie-talkies, our friendly neighborhood staffers were able to secure an empty room for everyone. I though this was especially cool since, in all honesty, they would have been well within their rights to shrug, say “Well, that’s why you always need to double check with the Info Desk” and run off to deal with the 457,435,054 other things going on at that moment. Instead, they took the time to fix the problem and attend to the need of the con-goers, which reflects very well on Katsucon (and ALMOST makes up for bumping the panel time around in the first place)

(Historical Notes: Maaaaaaan I was a lot more forgiving back in the old days.  Now that I’m a jaded old man, I’m nowhere near as ready to pat a con on the back for working to make up for a problem THEY THEMSELVES CAUSED.  Actually, though, the most interesting thing here is probably this vivid window into the the pre-smartphone app era of convention schedules.  These days, everybody with a proper device can get alerted to last minute changes right as they happen, and a lot of cons have screens that display the current schedule in real time.  But back in MY day, schedules only existed in booklets and handouts, so if any of that information changed, there wasn’t any way to stop all the misinformation from circulating all weekend.  Stuff like this still happens, obviously, but now it’s the minority of attendees who don’t find out about the change until it’s too late, rather than the minority being the ones who know to constantly double check everything with some exhausted staffer)