For those who don’t know already, I became a staff member for Anime Expo over the July 4th weekend. Being someone who fondly remembered saying that “Staffers are idiots” in previous cons, I found out this year that con-goers are also idiots. The two statements are not mutually exclusive.
I think I came to that conclusion mostly because I was picky for things out of the norm – those 90% of the people who followed rules and were generally understanding slipped our mind in a heartbeat, while those people who were real assholes would stay in our mind for a long long time. Of course we were far from perfect; I thought that I wasn’t briefed enough about protocols and schedules and deadlines, but we kept ourselves honest and did what we could to help. Out of all the people who we dealt with, only one or two people genuinely thanked us for our efforts; the rest of them were ungrateful, to say the least.
– There’s one artist who, after we explained multiple times that her registration didn’t go through, pretty much stood in one stop and kept complaining; we shoved her from the registration line out to the hall, and there she stood, still unwilling to stop bothering us (or bother the rest of the staff so they in turn bother us).
– One of the artist who didn’t get a table for Artist’s Alley insisted that she should be compensated for the 4000 plus dollars that she “potentially lost” for not getting a table.
– This year, three sides of our art show were not walled, and so there were many, many people who tried to take pictures of the art inside the art show from the outside. We had to fence the art like maniacs despite all the signs around the place that clearly said “NO PICTURES PLEASE”…
– And speaking of signs that got ignored, there’s one person who took his time to look at the sign we had at our entryway that said, “OPENS AT 10AM”. Then this guy turned to one of us and asked, “So does the show open at 10AM?”
– There’s one particular case of camera story that was particularly hard to deal with… basically, the English voice actress for Yomiko Readman really liked the Yomiko model we showcased, and somehow she snuck in a camera in her purse. By the time one of us went over to stop her she had taken one picture already; when we clearly told her to stop she took another. When we start haggling with her she pleaded that as Yomiko’s voice actress she deserved to get that picture… not to mention that she was sort of an important guest for the con. I didn’t know how the story ended; we let the manager take over situation in the end.