Monday, January 21, 2008

ConAdian memories - part 1

It was the early 90s. Christine was in charge of the Services division (and deputy Chair) for ConAdian – which was the ‘94 WorldCon held up here in the geographic center of North America. She went to the people she knew for help on her committee. Being in that group, I ended up being in charge of the Volunteer hospitality suite for ConAdian. It involved a certain amount of pre-con prep work and (hopefully) a lesser amount of at-con time.

I got my fencing buddy Paul Obirek (future PM of Canada) to help as my co-conspirator. We were responsible for the care and feeding of the volunteers. Space was booked for us in the hotel across from the convention centre and we had to make sure there were people in charge of the room, and that there was food, refreshments, and a quiet place for volunteers to unwind after they had put in some actual volunteer time.

We ended up being at the suite more than we had hoped. We were able to get away for a panel or two and were able to find some great volunteers to leave in charge here and there but we didn’t get to see much of the convention at all.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Don't forget the scavenger hunt! We made one of those gophers count all the stairs in the Place Louis Riel hotel!

David said...

Obi! How are you? Send me an email, guy.

I had forgotten about stairs. Like most conventions, the near-constant use of the elevators usually causes them to fail. The Place Louis Riel was the main convention hotel and the elevators did indeed go out. This meant that we had to climb the stairs up and down quite a bit.
For one of the scavenger hunt items, we asked for the total number of stairs from the bottom to the top floor. “We all climbed them, but did you count them?”
We sent a willing gopher to count the stairs – they came back with the totals for both sets of stairs.