So quickly I moved a couple of weeks ago. Which was interesting given that there were two conventions to deal with right after moving.
Cos & Effect which happened four days after moving and PAX Prime which was a week later. We only just got all the boxes into the house about eight hours ago. Which is great cause I can finally unpack things.
However I thought I'd do a bit of writing about what I did at PAX.
This was my first year attending PAX. I had wanted to go in previous years but generally school was in the way.
PAX itself was awesome. Probably my favourite convention now. I spent a lot of time wandering around and I got the chance to make it to a few panels. I even participated in my first MtG draft. And while I lost all the games I played it was pretty fun.
As well I was also on a panel. For the love of making: Geek Arts and Crafts. Probably the best write up of those on the panel is the blog post Tally did for it here:
tallystreasury.com/2012/08/cra…I was super nervous! Especially seeing the room they gave us was huge. And then to see the line up of people outside the door being huge too and still growing. From what I heard they had to turn people away.
If you're reading this and you showed up to the panel, thank you! And Annie the lead enforcer on that theater and all other enforcers who helped us out too, thank you! You were all great.
If you were there and you're reading this please leave a comment. I'd love to see your craftiness too.
Frankly one of my favourite parts of the panel was when Tally told people to feel free to craft during our panel and when she mentioned knitting I saw at least six people hold up their knitting needles. That made me super excited. I don't knit much but yarn crafting is one of my favourites and I love seeing people work on it, especially at conventions.
I think the panel went really well, especially for our first time out. I hope we'll be able to do something like it again next year. And now that I've been to PAX as well I have some ideas for what I'd like to do next year that I think would be a lot of fun.
I think meeting so many people was also something I really enjoyed about PAX. I got to talk to a number of people and share a lot of things with them. It was really exciting.
Matthew I remember in particular because I saw him crocheting at the Pokemon Conquest area. I've looked at his Etsy shop and wow his stuff is great. I'd urge people to check it out here:
www.etsy.com/shop/crochetlunch…I wish the whole weekend could have been sunshine and rainbows. Unfortunately I do have to say our hotel was providing a lot of trouble for the group of people I came with. My husband in particular. And not just during the event but plenty beforehand as well.
We stayed at the Sheraton. One of our friends got there first went to check in and they put a hold on his credit card for the entire amount without telling him that's what they were doing. Sure they asked for his credit card but he thought it would be for incidentals. Next thing you know my husband is hearing from him wondering what can be done.
We hadn't even left for Seattle yet and my husband was on the phone with the Sheraton trying to get this sorted out, because the rooms were going on his credit card for now. That somehow got sorted.
Then we get there and they can't find our room. That got sorted well enough but there was a lot of confusion. The real mess started to happen on Friday when more people were going to show up for another room he had booked for them. They couldn't find the room. Then they did and it wasn't what we had booked.
The problem comes here. The room that was booked was suppose to have two double beds. The one they "found" was a single King sized bed. At no point did anyone at the Sheraton try to help us sort this out or offer anything. The only answer we really got was "We're fully booked and we can't give you another room." Or "This is what we have listed as the room being."
We asked about getting a cot and they told us then that they would bring that up to the room at no extra charge. We asked about maybe being compensated by taking the price of the room down but the guy said he could only take off a little bit without management approval.
I mean he didn't even offer to go get the manager. I had to ask if there was management on duty. Which there was. And she would only offer giving us another room at the PAX rate. Which is weird since they kept saying they were fully booked. Also this wasn't really a viable solution since it meant we were going to have to pay more than what we should have had to.
Somehow this all got sorted out in the end and they found the room with the double beds that we were suppose to get. My problem with this is that they never once tried to actually help us or offer any solutions. We had to ask about every single one and constantly we were just getting blocked and shut down by being told "we can't do that" or "Well we're fully booked so there's nothing we can do."
I know it's a busy weekend for them and I know they have a lot of people to deal with.. however it felt like they were just hoping we'd go away and weren't really interested in helping us.
