Thinking about working at the AG registration desk reminded me of the worst US AG (Annual Gathering) I ever went to. It was in New York City, sometime in the early 80s, in a hotel in Grand Central Station. (Yup, there is a hotel there! Or at least right next door.)
There were over 2,000 Mensans attending. When people entered the hotel, they went first to the hotel desk and checked in. They were given a magnetic door key. (Magnetic keys were pretty new then.) Then they went directly to the Mensa registration desk, where they picked up their name badges, program packets, and meal tickets, and a "goody bag" to put everything in. The goody bag contained local maps, program venues and hospitality room numbers, rules and suggestion sheets, and for some strange reason, local advertising - which included several refrigerator magnets.
You already KNOW where this is going.
More than 900 "geniuses" erased their room keys before they even got to their rooms. (Yeah, me too.) It seems that the determining factor was whether one had a handy pocket to put the key in. Most keys went directly into the goody bag. ZAP!!! The hotel staff was not impressed.
Well, foo. We didn't know the magnets were in there. What the heck was advertising doing in there, anyway?
There are usually several hospitality suites, spread out around the hotel. Everybody who's not actively doing something congregates there. Usually a few of the rooms are where all the action is (the one smoking suite is always the most exciting), and then the others are fairly quiet. There's always lots of food and munchies, from monster subs to fruit and pizza, and soda, beer, and wine flowing freely. People who didn't spring for a meal plan can usually stay pretty well fed, and those who couldn't afford a room might find a few hour's sleep in one of the quieter suites.
Well, it seems that this was one of the most poorly organized AGs in history. The people who were in charge of keeping the hospitality suites stocked wandered off and forgot. Pizza was left chilling on the loading dock. Fruit was left rotting in closets. Bathtubs were full of either melted ice and no drinks, or warm beer and no ice. If you could find wine, there were no glasses. People were furious because there was nothing, anywhere. What was maddening was that it existed, but was not out.
The last day of the AG, I wandered into one of the less active hospitality suites, and found an amazing scene. The entire living room was filled with (dry) popcorn to a depth of about 25 inches. You couldn't see the coffee or side tables, and the sofa and chairs were covered past their seats. There were several people sitting around, half buried in popcorn, calmly talking as if this was nothing unusual. As I stood there openmouthed, a woman came out of the kitchen carrying a huge bowl of popcorn, waded to the center of the room, dumped the popcorn, wordlessly, and waded back into the kitchen. I felt like I'd stumbled into Wonderland.
The woman had discovered that the closets and every cabinet in the kitchen were packed with (unpopped) popcorn, which should have been distributed and was now going to be wasted. She was pissed! She decided that since all of us registrants had paid for the stuff, she was going to make sure that the NYC chapter didn't get to keep it for themselves. So she torqued up all the hot air poppers. I heard that by the end of the evening, the bedroom was chest deep in popcorn.
I wonder what the hotel staff thought of THAT!
=================================================
Now if you want a good regional gathering, go to one in Washington, DC. Things may have gotten calmer now, but back when I lived in that area, the local group had to wait every year for a new hotel to be built to schedule the next gathering, because they had been banned forevermore from every hotel they'd used in the past. Not because of damages, but because of "unseemly behavior". (A Regional Gathering is an "RG", of course. Pronounced "orgy".)
~~ Silk
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment