BayCon 2015Ā looms on the horizon.Ā Ā The increasing pace of email updates from the registration staff is bringing on flashbacks of the olden days, at BayCon 2014, when I fell deep into a gopher hole and didnāt emerge until the sun was fading on Memorial Day.
That is, last year I was a Gopher/Gofer/Go-fer at my local science-fiction convention. (Spelling must remain inconsistent & unimportant in this instance.) This year, Iām On Staff. Itās remotely possible that the two conditions are related, what the docs call ācomorbid conditionsā. Perhaps itās worth revisiting, to give folks a glimpse into the life of a convention Gofer. Or to enable recognition of incipient volunteerism.
It all started on check-in day, the Thursday evening before Opening Day.
ED-209 from RoboCop looms menacingly.
Inauspiciously, my badge was not waiting at the check-in table; something had gone wrong with the printing, and it was queued up with several other reprint orders. That meant I had nothing to do for a half-hour or so. Rather than sit patiently, I roamed the halls. The week before, Iād emailed a randomly-named staff address to ask about working as a go-fer, and the reply was fuzzy, but boiled down to stop-in-at-the-gopher-hole.Ā Ā But where was this secret base?
Welcome to Baycon, Sponsored by Adipose Industries
Suffice to say, I failed to locate the base, but the search renewed my acquaintance with the layout of the Hyatt Regency & Santa Clara Convention Center. So I collected my program and newly reprinted badge
Proof Of Membership
& went home to rest up for the long weekend.
Paradoxically, my unfulfilled search actually made me more determined to find the secret lair and get involvedā¦once things were up and running on Friday. The secret? The Gofer Hole owns one of the smaller meeting rooms in a relatively quiet zone (across the hall from the Bayshore Room at the Hyatt) but during the Con, itās clearly flagged with artistic signage and new Gofers are welcome to stop in and sign up.
HAHAHAHA Got Badge!
Amazingly, Friday morning, they would even let this demented individual sign up:
Gofer Lesson of the Day: Donāt give up, take advantage of āwastedā time to learn something or, heck, catch some zās.