Kat Dancing

I spent the past weekend at Toronto Trek 18. It was my second time really attending a sci-fi convention, and my first time being involved in one - I was volunteering and a panelist, so I was working before the con started and helping break down after the closing ceremonies. It was a blast, and I had almost no spare time, which meant that I barely visited the dealer's room and spent far, far less money than I've ever spent at a con. That it was a media con and had almost no books in the dealer's room probably helped.

Highlights:

Volunteering. This was great fun, although not in the sense of "wow, what a cool job." The first day I was helping out by the handicapped lift, which might have been interesting, except that as a volunteer I wasn't allowed to know the code that opened the lift. The hotel said that only very specific convention staff could know that code. I guess they thought we were going to take the lift for joyrides, which was amusing, considering that it was the slowest friggin' lift in the history of mankind (No. Really. I could have carried people up the stairs faster.) So my job was to sit there and tell anyone who showed up while the authorized staff were sloooowly riding the lift up that they would be right back. I did this for four hours. Fun.

The next day I spent an hour working the autograph line. My job was to stand at what appeared to be the end of the line and explain to people that this was not, in fact, the end of the line. The end of the line was down there.

After that I worked Ten-Forward, the lounge area, where my job was giving out free drinks to the other volunteers and panelists. More specifically, I sat behind a table and opened their drinks for them and removed the little metal tabs, because the hotel had decided, in its intriguing hotel way, that an unopened drink was being sold, which they couldn't allow (only the hotel proper being allowed to exhort money from people), but an open drink was a gift.

Hey. I don't have to understand. I just open the damned drinks.

On Sunday I helped with the breakdown, which was probably the least boring job I got, and learned all kinds of interesting ways to coil cable and fold curtains.

But luckily the real enjoyment of volunteering wasn't the work, but the other volunteers, who were, with rare exceptions, funny, interesting, intelligent, and enjoyable people. I had a lot of fun.

Panels. I was on three, none of which I had the knowledge or authority to be on. Nevertheless I had a great time and Dan insists that I didn't make an idiot of myself. I came away from each with a lot to think about. The best was probably the artificial intellgence panel, which stayed mostly on topic, had an unusally cooperative audience, and had fantastic panelists. I had fun, and even got a real laugh out of the audience at one point ("Do we really want sentience in slaves? No. It's inconvenient.")

People. I am not even going to attempt to list the people I met over the weekend: it would take too damned long, and my ever-unstable memory has already lost half their names. Suffice to say that between volunteering, panels, being dragged around to meet Dan's friends (who, at a conservative estimate, make up half the friggin' universe), parties, more panels, more volunteering, random people who I collided with in the hallways, roomates, more parties, and general con-ness, I met a lot of people, all of whom were great fun. By Sunday I was too sleep-deprived to even be surprised when I ended up in a hot tub with a bunch of them. And they all seemed to like me back, which was... enjoyably novel.

That barely even begins to cover the con, much less the other stuff that's been happening, but hey, I had to start catching up somewhere. Further postage will occur. I promise. (Yes, George, you can stop poking me now....)