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Tell me about your worst experiences at a convention. (SF, mainly, but I'll gladly listen to stories about professional conventions, political conventions, whatever.)
I'm especially interested in issues of accessibility, but also curious about anything that makes a convention unwelcoming or miserable.
If you'd rather not make your story public, feel free to email me -- username at livejournal dot commmm.
My worst experience? At an RWA convention, where my agent invited me to a brunch for clients of the agency. I ended up sitting between two up-and-coming writers (now well-known), one of whom was talented and the other movie-star beautiful. They spent the entire meal sniping at one another across my plate. I was not prepared for that kind of vicious competitiveness, such a raw display of envy and hatred, and I felt trapped.
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July 24 2009, 10:27:19 UTC 2 years ago
I arrived on the first morning to discover that there was precisely one undergraduate attending (me), plus two postgrads from a London institution, and that because the conference was so small, so subject-specific, everyone knew everyone else, everyone was desperate to catch up with one another's news, and it was like being the first spousal unit to go on group holiday with a bunch of old friends. They made absolutely no attempt to in any way welcome or integrate this little group of outsiders they'd agitated so hard to get, or to respond to their presence in any way, and the two postgrads stuck to each other like glue and would not speak to me at all.
The nature of the conference was such that one fended for oneself for meals, so no chance to talk there either, and in the end, I spent three days taking my tea breaks alone in the Great Court at the British Museum to avoid standing around like a spare part in the conference centre (the conference cookies were, incidentally, outstanding, and quite the best part of the whole thing), and trekking to the nearby Pret at lunchtime.
It was in London, so I commuted from home each day and saw PK in the evenings. Had I travelled further, organised somewhere to stay in London and so on, and spent three days on my own like that I'd have considered myself very poorly treated. As it was, I managed to keep myself amused between conference sessions, and left before the closing session on Saturday. Excellent papers, entirely shitty ambience.
I'm glad to say it is the only conference of that size and specifity I've ever been to where they treated newbies so cluelessly, but it stands out all the more for that.
July 26 2009, 03:34:55 UTC 2 years ago
But yes: mostly old tenured professors and a few post-docs, and we (very few) postgrads were expected to stay quiet and listen to the Wise Words of the professors even though
(a)It was marketed as a postgraduate discussion group and
(b)It was an general science ethics discussion where most of the participants were (like me) from the maths department, and thus the opinions of the professors were not necessarily any more informed than ours (and in some cases were utter bunk).
THe other postgrads stayed deathly silent but I had opinions dammit so gabbed away, with my Phd supervisor giving me not so subtle looks the whole time :D
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July 24 2009, 13:01:33 UTC 2 years ago
He learned otherwise when he came to my room to apologize and I had to be held back by a mutual friend, some 6'4" to my 4'11", as I roared, "NOBODY TOUCHES ME LIKE THAT WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! EVER!" Didn't need that much adrenaline, nup.
July 26 2009, 09:27:52 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 13:56:39 UTC 2 years ago
Too. Many. FanBois.
I am not normally claustrophobic, but it kicked in big time there. I only made one pass of the dealers' room -- it was too emotionally exhausting to go back into that fray.
The one panel I wanted to see? People started lining up six hours beforehand. Save for a panel in which Nathan Fillion, Hugh Jackman, Viggo Mortensen and Clive Owen all get up on stage and strip naked, there is no panel at any con that can possibly be worth spending six hour sitting on your ass to attend.
July 24 2009, 15:16:14 UTC 2 years ago
Ooh, hell, yes, I'd wait six hours to see that one. Although, Viggo gets nekkid on film quite a lot (The Indian Runner, Eastern Promise), bless his dear sweet heart.
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July 24 2009, 14:47:14 UTC 2 years ago
July 26 2009, 09:34:34 UTC 2 years ago
Probably because I am fat and middle-aged, so they skip the dominance displays of courting.
July 24 2009, 14:47:21 UTC 2 years ago
One rather awkward memory was at a party at the 2003 Toronto Worldcon. I'd volunteered to introduce a friend to a somewhat Big Shot SF person who I had some slight acquaintance with. Big Shot was in a group of people, and to this day, I still can't say for sure if we were being shunned or if it was just a case of my being jetlagged and relatively new to conventions making me too socially tentative. But none of my attempts to make eye-contact had any effect, and every time there was a pause in the conversation or someone left the group, the group mysteriously shifted away from us and closed up to exclude us. My friend and I eventually looked at each other, shrugged, and gave up.
July 25 2009, 01:49:43 UTC 2 years ago
July 24 2009, 15:06:52 UTC 2 years ago
What Nora had to say.
July 24 2009, 15:54:06 UTC 2 years ago
I... what?
Wow.
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July 24 2009, 16:04:11 UTC 2 years ago
July 25 2009, 13:26:04 UTC 2 years ago
I can only imagine what would have happened if that weight loss had not been "deliberate" but was, instead, caused by fighting some serious illness.
WOW.
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July 24 2009, 16:07:58 UTC 2 years ago
Trouble was that the conference was in a casino and there was no way to get around the casino without walking through great clouds of tourist smoke. I felt like crap by the second day and was having a very hard time just going from my room to a seminar room, muchless doing anything fun.
I was also amused to find Disabled Access signs that directly pointed at staircases. And the Gambling Problem? signs with phone numbers to call for help were next to ripped out public phones.
July 24 2009, 16:11:22 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 16:21:48 UTC 2 years ago
This doesn't even approach the level of some people's bad con experiences (no assault or harassment), but it was really annoying, and would have been much more so if I was not completely able-bodied.
So, Anime Expo 2007 at the Long Beach convention center. The music video contest was scheduled for one of the evenings, and we went to line up a few hours before, as one tends to do at large cons. We'd been there a bit less than an hour, IIRC, when the con staff decided to move the line-up area. So far, so good, except that they decided to make us all stand in line IN THE PARKING LOT. In the evening, when a lot of people were leaving, IN THEIR CARS. So, there were thousands of people lined up in the parking lot, dodging cars, for hours. To top it off, the people running the video show were incompetent, and the start of the show was delayed for what turned out to be, like, 2 hours. Not that anybody bothered to tell the thousands of people standing in the convention center parking lot about it. AND THEN to top it off, once they finally seated everybody in the auditorium, they announced that THEY'D LOST THE DVD with the video on, they didn't have a backup, and so the show was cancelled. LIKE THEY COULDN'T HAVE ANNOUNCED THAT HOURS AGO WHEN WE WERE TRYING NOT TO GET RUN OVER???
You all may be wondering why I didn't just leave. I would have if I'd been by myself, but the AMV show is my friend's favorite thing at the con, and she REALLY wanted to see it. So, we waited.
(Fortunately, the con people learned from that fiasco, and the main events have been WAY better-organized at subsequent Anime Expos.)
July 24 2009, 23:01:05 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 17:49:06 UTC 2 years ago
Do the "booth babes" have to sign a waver promising not to sue the guys trying to grope them on camera before they can man EA's booths?
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July 24 2009, 18:22:32 UTC 2 years ago
I don't go to that Con anymore. Someone, somewhere, gave him my room number and told him my last name so he could get a key.
July 25 2009, 13:37:26 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 18:31:10 UTC 2 years ago
Or more specifically the conference rooms of the arena.
Without registering the fact that a Van Halen concert was scheduled for the arena proper the Saturday night of the con.
Fill parking lot with loud, excited tailgate parties of rock fans. Now, have various costumed fans walking back and forth from the arena to the hotel. It became... interesting, in a whole 'put together a roster of large forbidding looking volunteers and have the fans wait and cross the parking lot in groups' kind of way.
I've also been verbally harrassed by passing fans while waiting in line for the disablility acess seating at more than one con for not looking disabled enough. At least twice it's been a con-goer who took it upon themselves to go up and down the line and ask people why they should 'get to use' disability services. NOT a con staff member, mind you, just Joe Random Fan. (I may have said some slightly unkind things to them in reply.)
Another con put the handicap access volunteer's desk first up a half flight of stairs (no elevator) and when that was protested found the handicap access volunteer 'a whole office just for your department'. Said office had elevator access but the only way for anyone unable to do stairs to get to it was to find a hotel staffer to unlock a freight elevator. I was the mostly-able bodied assistant for a friend that con, and ended up being the one who went to Con Operations and explaining what was wrong with this. I was politely coldly furious- or so an onlooker told me later.
July 24 2009, 19:35:30 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 18:34:06 UTC 2 years ago
Things I remember being at least mildly annoying:
Trying to find the hotel for the Tribal Forces con this spring. It was out in the middle of nowhere and directions were confusing at best.
The utter lack of cell phone reception at NYCC. It took almost half an hour to find the people I was trying to meet up with there, because no one's phone worked. Some people I never managed to connect with at all. (though there's not much any convention staff could so about that one)
Military flight test conference three years ago. Over twenty Indian air force officers arrived at the airport in Washington DC to find that transportation for them from Dulles to [name of air station redacted to protect the incompetant] had not been arranged in advance. People had to call the Indian embassy, and three attendees had to take a taxi all the way to [air station continues to conceal its name in shame]. The Technical Director and CO of the squadron hosting the meeting were livid. On the positive side, the navy wives club women in charge of refreshments made sure there was a vegetarian option and brought chicken sandwiches instead of ham or roast beef (after someone thankfully pointed out, "You do realize half the conference attendees are going to be Hindu or Muslim, yes?"), so at least when the foreign officers got there after their six hour plane flight from London and two hour cab ride, there was something for them to eat.
There was also the 2003 "blizard-con" at Katsucon in DC, when Washington DC got a massive snowfall of over a foot the weekend of the con and people's cars were stuck in the un-snowplowed hotel parking lot, but that was completely beyond the hotel staff or convention staff's control. The hotel and con staff actually handled it very well, extending many people's hotel stays to cover an extra day even though no one had reservations for said extra day, and organizing impromptu panels for the guests trapped at the con (alas, my college's anime club missed out. Not realizing that the snowstorm extended all the way down to southern Virginia and that our classes on Monday had already been cancelled, we spent Sunday night driving at a crawl through the snow down route 81, counting all the cars stuck on the side of the road).
July 26 2009, 10:02:34 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 18:50:04 UTC 2 years ago Edited: July 24 2009, 18:50:44 UTC
It's a toss-up!
There was the year I was thirteen, at my first convention, painfully shy and very eager to meet one of the guests, a Big Name Pro Author. At a meet-the-authors event, I waited for a break in the conversation and asked him to sign a book. He refused -- and then, in front of a table of adults, berated and ridiculed me for several eternally long minutes, denigrating my etiquette, social skills and upbringing. No one else defended me, and I was too humiliated and too cowed to even leave (since he was an adult, a man, a pro, and much bigger than me, and I was a young teen, a girl, a nobody fan, and small even for my age), let alone say anything, until he was done. At which point I slinked off, shut myself in my room and cried for two hours, and then exchanged all of the books of his I'd bought at the con for books by one of the other guests, Poul Anderson, who had been very sweet to me. (I got really, retrospectively, interesting mixed messages later: some of the adults who witnessed it [including someone on the concomm] later came up to say that he was out of line in chewing me out and embarrassing me like that, but then immediately went on to say That's Just How [Big Pro] Is, but he's so interesting and cool in other ways, so that makes it okay, right?)
The other contender, same con but two years later, was when I was hit on relentlessly at the afternoon dance by someone (someone I think fairly popular in the local sf/f club, of which I was not a member) who wanted me to come to his BDSM room party. I said no and no and no and no, and he kept pushing and pushing and physically crowding me, at which point I finally snapped and said that I was fifteen and that if he didn't stop asking I would go tell hotel security. That did successfully scare him off. In retrospect I probably should have told security or at least someone, but I was so relieved that he was gone that I fled.
I think the generalized problem from these was that there were plenty of people around, but nobody was willing to go out on a limb or make any gesture to protect a young, vulnerable person from harassment. (I was, for the record, there with chaperonage both times, but in both cases we were temporarily apart -- at the dance, the harassment happened while my friend's mother was in the restroom.) Especially if the harassment came from a comparatively high-status individual. And there wasn't anyone I could go to, except hotel security.
(Both of these were at a smallish, fairly old-school sf/f con.)
July 24 2009, 21:03:13 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 18:51:49 UTC 2 years ago
I was grouchy as hell after that con.
July 24 2009, 20:42:44 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 19:04:28 UTC 2 years ago
- I'm chilling out at a reception with my friends "Alice", "Bob", and "Carol". Fairly big-name researcher "Don" comes up to talk to "Alice", ignoring the rest of us. He proceeds to complain about "those assholes who rejected our paper" (loudly, while in earshot of many of "those assholes") and talk about how he's only attending this conference to register a complaint about how bad it's gotten.
- Paul Graham gave an invited talk at a conference I went to once, which was not only almost completely off-topic for the conference (he was originally going to give one talk, listed in the program, and decided on his own to give a talk on something totally different). During the Q&A, someone asked him what he thought about outsourcing. He said something along the lines of "it's all fine and good to send stuff out to India, until you realize that you need real programmers."
- Last year, at the academic conference I go to regularly, there was a free-alcohol-and-food reception sponsored by a couple of banks and military contractors that were trying to recruit. It was announced at the last minute and there wouldn't have been a conference social event if not for the sponsors turning up. Needless to say, I found it objectionable to tie social events to corporate sugar-daddy-dom (even if companies want to recruit, there really should be a social event anyway).
- At a hackathon following another conference, one participant (I'll call him "George") generally wouldn't shut up about his father (who really was a famous computer scientist, it's true) during every conversation. He was fiftyish and thus a bit old to be riding on his father's achievements. At the time I was still presenting as something vaguely female and had been marvelling internally at how in a group of 19 guys or so, I was the only non-guy in the room but no one was making an issue of it. Well, then we went out to dinner and when everybody appeared dumbstruck when the waiter asked us what kind of wine we wanted, I said (in a brilliant and stunning stroke of insight) "we'll have the house red". "George" then proceeded to make a big issue of isn't that great, how like the only woman there to show such decisiveness.
July 26 2009, 10:14:19 UTC 2 years ago
July 24 2009, 19:25:44 UTC 2 years ago
July 26 2009, 10:19:41 UTC 2 years ago
I'll happily send you copies of everything I'm assembling about access, BTW. Wiscon's policy is pretty much the gold standard, and it's available on their site.
How do you perceive the differences between ReaderCon and WisCon? This is actually germane to what I'm doing -- working on a concom for a new con.
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July 24 2009, 19:42:02 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 19:42:19 UTC 2 years ago
Arisia moved recently from the Park Plaza in Boston — an ancient hotel with quirky rooms, but functioning elevators — to the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge: modern, glittery, and with the worst set of elevators I've ever encountered in a hotel. At any given time half of them were out of order and the other half were so overburdened (some of the programming was on the first three floors, some on the 14th) that I gave up trying to take my kids anywhere. Some of the dozens of congoers waiting had the option to go up and down stairs; those of us using canes or wheelchairs did not. I won't go to Arisia again unless they move to another hotel.
July 25 2009, 02:20:25 UTC 2 years ago
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July 24 2009, 20:03:43 UTC 2 years ago
The San Jose Doubletree.
I don't drive; even if I could drive, I can't afford to rent a car when I'm already splurging on a hotel stay (when I'm not staying with local people) and a cross-continental trip. Things I've attended there have often had a cheap food line available, plus there are the three restaurants in the hotel (suffering from the flaws of hotel restaurants regarding price).
There is not a damn thing within easy walking distance that provides food and is open on a weekend.
July 24 2009, 20:56:45 UTC 2 years ago
food options for DoubleTree San Jose
Denny's at 1st and Tasman and McDonald's at Tasman 1/2 block north have been open for many years now.A new food court has opened up at Old Bayshore and 1st with a Subway, Chipolte, Red Brick Pizza, a Vietnamese and a Hawaiian restaurant.
These are all within easy walking distance.
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July 24 2009, 20:07:00 UTC 2 years ago
Here via <lj user="vito_excalibur">
Accio 05 at Reading University, UK. The university campus seems to have been designed to facilitate sexual assault (all the paths wander off the roadside to go through badly lit dips and hollows in woodland - there are even random patches of cover planted in the middle of car parking spaces).The gala dinner ran late in an isolated dining hall 15 minutes walk across said campus, a dining hall without any form of bar or ante-chamber or any other means of temporary escape. The dinner ran late and at 10:30 the GoH, Steve Vander Ark, got up to speak and was still going strong over an hour later, while I had a pounding migraine but didn't fancy crossing the campus alone to get back to my room. Eventually I and a friend decided to leave before the end of the speech, and met another woman who'd been waiting to leave (her friend had been taken off to hospital following an incident with a stack of crashing plates which had left her leaving stitches, so obviously the woman concerned wasn't in the mood for the dinner but had been waiting in the porch literally shivering with fear at the prospect of crossing the campus for about 40 minutes) and we all walked back together. Subsequently we learned that Vander Ark had chuntered on until past midnight, and I'm fairly certain that we couldn't have been the only ones who wanted to leave early but had been effectively imprisoned there because of the hostile environment outside. If any of us had been as rich as JK Rowling we'd have probably got in first and sued Vander Ark for false imprisonment and cruel and unusual punishment.
Next morning I logged on to lj and discovered that two of the planning committee had been enjoying themselves sporking my Friday presentation in a public post about the con, along with bonus insults about my physical appearance and personal mannerisms.
July 25 2009, 16:08:03 UTC 2 years ago
Re: Here via <lj user="vito_excalibur">
Wow. Fuckers. O.oJuly 24 2009, 21:06:02 UTC 2 years ago
First I parked my chair to hobble into a non-handicap stall. When I got out, my chair was gone. Thoughtfully removed by a fan who felt it was "in the way," with a nasty note.
Then I sat in the hotel restaurant for dinner. We had moved the chair opposite so that I would have space to wheel under the table. A bustling waiter felt that the chair was in his way, because it stuck out about 8 inches (less than a person would have) and efficiently shoved it back under the table, with full force right into my injured foot.
I howled. The waiter muttered, "Sorry" and disappeared into the kitchen.
The manager was summoned and I explained briefly what had happened, and that I felt that I was owed an apology. The waiter was retrieved and a perfunctory apology was duly provided. The manager did not offer to comp the meal, and we did not ask.
Hotel security then arrived, further interrupting our meal, and offered to call the paramedics for me. I declined in favor of a plastic bag of ice (which security had to provide, as the restaurant would not) and the chair being removed from our table. No lasting harm was done to the offended foot.
A week later, I received a form "denial of injury claim" letter from the Hyatt. Amusing since I had made no claim.
July 24 2009, 22:49:48 UTC 2 years ago
offup to the big comics guests. This meant that access was only available if the guest had a special dot on his/her admittance badge, but they didn't bother to tell anybody about this until after the guests had already arrived.There was the ExotiCon in New Orleans at the beginning of this decade, where the out-of-town guests were given free hotel space in exchange for covering plane fare. Previous years, no problem, but this was the year that the convention chairman quit at the end of the convention. The dogfelcher who took it over decided to be fiscally prudent a few minutes later, by telling the convention hotel (which was already a nightmare) that guests remaining on Sunday night were responsible for paying that last night at the hotel. We didn't discover this until checkout on Monday morning, the new con chair was conveniently not answering his phone, and the slimedog hotel manager smirked "You can not pay if you want, but we'll still take it out of your credit card."
Everyone's familiar with the Fed-Con fiasco in Dallas last year, but not that many people remember Conniption, run in the early Nineties. The '93 show was the one where the convention didn't start contacting potential guests until the Wednesday before the con, and apparently started advertising the show at about then. This was a personal note for me, as I had just sold my first book about a week before, and when I found I was the only attendee of a panel, I asked everyone if we could skip the panel and let me do a reading. Everyone agreed but one Cat Piss Man who was planning on videotaping the panel, and when I told him that we didn't have enough of a crowd to make a panel relevant, he threw a chair at me.
There was Readercon in 2000, where I was hit with a serious financial strike when my car blew a water pump, head gasket, and head all at the same time, on one of the hottest days of the year about a month before the con. I frantically tried to contact anybody at the convention, only had the main E-mail address on the Web site, and repeatedly sent notice that my entire budget for the con was gone and that I probably couldn't attend. One of the staff learned about this a week before the show and called me: when I asked why she hadn't received the notice before, I was informed that the guy in charge of answering E-mail wanted the job but didn't want to do the work, and every time anyone tried to fire him and get someone who did, he whined and cried about it until they reinstated him. (This was three years after a similar situation where I simply couldn't get out to the con from Oregon. I actually had a staffer call me on Thursday night to try to talk me into getting on a plane on Friday morning, and when I explained (a) I had just had to have my savannah monitor put down, (b) didn't have any vacation time at work to use, and (c) couldn't afford a last-minute plane ticket from Portland to Boston, was asked "Well, don't you know someone you could borrow the money from so you can attend?")
July 24 2009, 22:50:00 UTC 2 years ago
Continued
I could keep going, and each and every tale explains why I quit having anything to do with the fucking things at the end of 2000 (particularly after the convention that promised 5000 attendees and actually got about 150 because the convention chair thought that promotion should be limited to putting flyers by the front door of Dallas area comic shops, or the convention that deliberately scheduled events opposite opening and closing ceremonies), but my absolute favorite was A-Kon, an anime convention here in Dallas. Back at the turn of the last century, the convention decided to start exploiting non-anime guests, and I was dumb enough to show up, as I was trying to promote my column in SCI FI magazine. That was the day the water pump on my car died, and I borrowed my then-wife's car in a fit of responsibility to get to the convention on Friday night. Well, I had no programming to do on Friday, and none at all because the iBook retaining all of the non-anime programming was taken out with a spare can of Coke earlier that week. Since the convention chairwoman preferred "free" to "good", she funnelled out design of the convention guide to some twits in Austin willing to do it for free, and absolutely amazingly it came back from the printer with all of the non-anime guests' bios missing. Even better, because of the scheduling iBook's meltdown, the chairwoman told all of us "Oh, if you see a panel you like, you have permission to crash it," and I finally went home after being literally tackled three times by con staffers who wanted free magazines from me. I even forgot to mention the joys of showing up on Saturday, only to find that the only parking for nearly five miles was completely full, including paid parking, and being told by those same staffers "You know, there's paid parking up on top."The cherry on top? I made a public announcement to fans at the beginning of 2001 that I wasn't going to be at any conventions at all for at least the next year, because I was doing nothing but losing money. The A-Kon chairwoman wrote me back: "I know you said you weren't going to do any more conventions, but are you going to be at A-Kon this year?"
July 25 2009, 00:43:18 UTC 2 years ago Edited: July 25 2009, 00:44:06 UTC
Here via Metafandom
My first MediaWestCon. Around '95-'96.I was a reasonably new artist showing my work for the first time in a convention artshow. I had my panel assigned right next to one of the BNFs of the fanart world of the time, whose work I'd been admiring for years. He turned out to be fabulous, entirely approachable, and very encouraging. Yet in the middle of getting a constructive yet positively-worded, completely-volunteered critique of my work from him? Some random old fandom hag (that's the only way I can describe her) had to place herself between me and said artist and completely rip apart each and every one of my pieces on display in front of both of us: how bad every likeness was, how poor my technique was, on and on and on for at least ten minutes without pause. When she finally wandered off, the artist guy just looked at me dumbfounded at the attack and I was completely devastated. It took a number of years before I would set foot at that convention again, let along show my artwork there or anywhere else. I still to this day have no idea what set off this one person's tirade against me and my work except for the fact that perhaps she was jealous this artist was giving me so much of his personal time? I have no idea. But it certainly remains my worst convention experience ever, though I have lots of other horror stories from scifi and media fandom cons as well.
July 25 2009, 00:51:37 UTC 2 years ago
Re: Here via Metafandom
Oh yeah and the creepy Trek fanboy at Shore Leave one year who accosted me, alone in the hallway late at night, acting like he knew me for years (I'd never seen him before in my life) begging for "a hug". And reaching in for one and groping me before I had a chance to get beyond "Are you fucking kidding me?" to "Do I need to call hotel security right now?!" That's another one for the nightmare record books.I won't even get into some of the horrific shit I saw from a media guest or two at a convention where I was helping with guest relations.
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