I'm back from
Reactor, which - as you can guess about a convention that was in deep freeze for two years due to whatever trouble they got into at the Westin Wheeling - was about as small and shrunken as a Birther's brain because of the layoff.
A few points:
1) My opinion of the hotel I was at (and I'm not mentioning it by name here, but you can find out which one it was at the con web site or remember if it you were at any Windycons from 2004 to 2007) has gone downhill again. An earlier room change fiasco in 2005 at Windycon caused a roommate of mine to get billed a
regular room rate instead of the con rate after front desk newbies co-mingled his reservation records with a departed airline pilot's. Although he cleared that problem up, he still had to come back to said hotel a weekend later to clean up a billing issue for a dinner he didn't have at the restaurant because their computer still thought he was the pilot from Air Dine and Dash.
Fair enough. We've had problems with those guys before, but those were straightened out.
And now, some more problems.
Try this one on for size: how about one front desk clerk not finding a record of my roommate's arrival, room number or even the fact that he reserved a key for me? How about my coming back, talking to the other clerk on duty at the time and getting a key after stomping around for over an hour trying to find the room by the poster that he usually puts on the door? Granted, I
did find the room by that poster. Nevertheless, I was still in the reservation system since the new clerk checked my ID
against the computer's records. What a shock.
Oh, and then there was the problem with the key card; just like Capricon in 1998 and Worldcon in 2000, a coding bug insured that it would fail every time a new key card was used in the door or whenever another key was recoded because of the same problem. This happened about five times or so over a three day period.
Ah, technology.
Although the addition of roommates helped with the price of the room, the male member of the couple we got in on Friday had a bit of a problem that night. Drinking damn near an entire bottle of Jack Daniels over a few hours resulted in exactly what you'd assume it would result in. I'm just glad it wasn't
my bed he, er, decorated. Granted, they helped with the cleanup and paid in full before they split early from the con before Saturday night, but let's just say that the sheets, pillows and comforter weren't found anywhere near their original room.
Oh, and the other problem with the con?
No open room parties allowed. Period.
Like I said before, Reactor has a rep because of past incidents. Still, the fact that I overhead hotel security staffers mentioning down in the bar that they would toss people from rooms after giving them
one warning about noise complaints didn't give me pause since con security would probably intervene before that was necessary.
More's the pity that I didn't
see any con security. None. Nada. I'm not kidding.
Oh, they may have been there. They were just using their invisibility powers. Honest. I'm not sure how many people got tossed by hotel security, but my guess is it that happened at least once.
There's a bunch of other stuff I could mention about this thing, but the con chair allegedly quit (or "quit", if you catch my drift) a week before the actual thing was held and it looked it. No badges - wristbands. A "program book" that was four double-sided pages of xeroxes stapled horizontally. An exhibition hall about one one-hundredth the size of Anime Central's, and therefore not providing much in the way of DVD or book bargains, which was my primary reason for going to this thing. And so on.
I could go on, but I'd rather not. I'm just going to have to wait a few months for a better con to go to.
Unsuprisingly, it probably won't be an
anime con.
