Green Room

[redbird]

I was part of the Green Room crew Cally and elisem recruited, as far as I can tell, almost entirely on alt.polyamory. (The exception to that being truepenny, who I think took more shifts than I did despite also working for Elise in the Dealer's Room.

This is mostly easy work: feed a few people, walk down the hall with a sign saying "Five Minutes", and be there in case you're needed. The main thing is that it involves a commitment to stay put for a while (loosely--nothing wrong with asking someone who's in there anyway to hold the fort while I go to the loo). gwynyth took the early morning shifts, leaving me and Cally free to have breakfast with papersky instead of opening Green Room.

At one point Saturday afternoon, there were enough people in there that the room produced two loud conversations, and the people in the programming space next door came in and complained. We kicked almost everyone out of Green Room at that point: it's program prep space, not an auxiliary special secret con suite. I shushed people preemptively the next morning. (This isn't usually an issue, because Green Room isn't usually right next door to programming; it also doesn't usually handle the five-minute warnings, but being nearby and there being only a few program items at a time, it made sense.) Lenny Bailes was difficult to expel, so I put him to work making coffee. (Lenny had annoyed me much earlier in the con by a gratuitous display of tactlessness.)

Sunday morning Cally looked at me and said "Would you like to run Green Room next year?" I don't think she expected me to say "yes", but I'd been considering offering to do it this year, so this made sense. I took the 1-2 shift Sunday, which nobody had signed up for, so Cally could go to a rocketry panel; I lunched on babaghanoush spread on garlic bread (Elise had been shopping that morning). This worked as lunch, and considering how well going out for lunch had worked the day before, had a practical appeal.

During tear-down, Cally attempted to invest me with ceremonial Green Room regalia, but nobody else was looking. She also announced that I had accepted the job during the Dead Dog, again to a complete lack of attention. In practice, I'll need to contact appropriate Minn-stf people and offer, but I suspect they'll accept unless they're bothered by having the job done from 1000 miles away, meaning I'd miss all the Minicon meetings.

Comments

Green Room

[(Anonymous)]

I'm afraid that I'm not aware of whatever I did to annoy Vicki earlier in the convention. I did sit in a corner of the Green Room, (apparently, after the incident in which she decided she felt she needed to evict everyone). I was using the Ethernet jack in the room to collect e-mail as several other program participants and con-com members had done throughout the convention. Vicki asked me to avoid making too much noise and to be careful about liquid spills. I did play an animation of a Tom Lehrer song for Jordin Kare at a fairly quiet volume, after observing that no program participants were in there, at the time, talking or working on their next panel. I don't know if this offended Vicki's sense of decorum, but if she'd asked me not to do it, I would certainly have complied.

Vicki should know, by now, that if she has a problem with me, she can tell me about it, instead of complaining about me behind my back. But, apparently, sometimes I upset her without meaning to or knowing about it.

Lenny Bailes <lennyb@speakeasy.net>

Re: Green Room

[redbird]

What you did was, very early in the con, after we had deliberately and obviously changed the subject when Robert Sawyer started coming over, loudly ask in Sawyer's presence what rysmiel's problem was with Sawyer's dinosaurs, thus pushing him to answer the question in front of Rob Sawyer.

If you absolutely needed, or simply wanted, to know that, you could have asked at some other time or place.

Also, as I noted in the post you were commenting to, the noise issue wasn't just a matter of disturbing people who were in the Green Room, but those who were next door. You were in the room when I pointed this out.