GenCon: Day -3
Well, last week, my co-pilot Pete (The Logistics Schmuck) asked "Hey. The room's booked from Monday through Sunday. Do we wanna just go down Monday night?
Me. Uh. Sure! *Drop into MASC and start knocking out pre-con objectives left, right, center, and even a couple in the rear arc*
After a...small tour-de-force through parts of Indy we really didn't ABSOLUTELY need to see...we arrived, parked, checked in and crashed out at around 1AM Local Time (Eastern).
GenCon: Day -2
Sweet Baby Kerensky! It's darned NICE to be able to wake up and NOT have that morning haul ahead of me!
Here's how Loren found the same place we got the truck from last year.
"Are you the guys with the dog?"
The place that rented us the truck last year had this absolutely HUGE pooch "Hector". He's still there and even bigger...He doesn't chase cars. He chases main battle tanks. AND CATCHES THEM.
Anyhoo, truck objective: ACCOMPLISHED.
The place that had our hand trucks and pallet jacks wasn't answering yet. So we head over to our new, regular warehouse.
FRREAKIN AWESOME!
The place we were in last year looked like a remnant in a war zone (think "One of those bombed out husks from the end of "Full Metal Jacket" and you'll be pretty much dead on).
This place, nice, CLEAN, orderly, PROFESSIONAL. Real, full-height docks. They loaded us up, pre-loaded the next batch and basically assigned us a door until we were done.
We nearly lost Randall to The Wall Of Leviathans. 8 pallets of it. He's been kinda dreamy-eyed and looking for a smoke ever since. ;)
Then we hit the martialing yard...Eventually. Gotta love a place that has 58 docks and assigns only 5 (yes FIVE) to people hauling in their own stuff.
So we waited almost two hours till we finally got a dock.
After that, Pete ran the loads and I ran interference with the martialing yard. He'd call me and I'd go get a tag right away.
To be fair, the two people in the yard were (and always have been) as helpful as they can be considering they have no say in the arrangements.
And later in the day it got easier to get a dock.
Anyhoo, with three pallet jacks (we still have the crummy one we were comped by the place that lost our original one) unloading went fast.
We made an equipment run so we'd have a power drill for tomorrow (which is charging next to me as we speak).
The booth itself is about 95% assembled. Meaning most of what we have to do tomorrow is simply get product set out.
No last minute early-early BS on Thursday.
So, assembly, spread across two days, is MUCH nicer.
The pizza arrived, we ate, packed up and headed out.
We reacquainted ourselves with why we hate WalMart. They have like 20 lanes, and 4 open. Each sporting 8 or more customers to a line. And only one of us had less than 20 items.
Heather bore the brunt. She got stuck behind some dope who kept getting let out of line to run for stuff, come back, run for something else. Instead of killing the transaction and making said idjit get back in line when they had all their stuff...
Amy and I got lucky. We happened to overhear two cashiers coming back from break and dived into the line as it opened. MWAHAHAHAHAH! I hate shopping. >:(
In addition to my other duties this year, I'm also the AV schmuck. I haul the company plasma screen because shipping something like that would be like asking for a bullet to the head.
Also, we have a bunch of vids to display again this year and I at least had the equipment to do some of the prep work and hardware to easily display it without needing to slave a full computer to the thing. I also made sure we have a projector for a couple of the talks. It's been a few years since I was able to attend our "What's up" talks and see people. So this is a nifty excuse.
Anyhoo, it's after 11, I need to go wash the stink and dirt off me and get some sleep. Early to rise tomorrow.
Also, taking bets on how many copies of Leviathans we're going to sell.
