chrisvenus

By popular demand and because I'm in need of something distracting right now I've decided to write the first of my followup posts - the life of a gopher.

For those that don't know...

go·pher
n.
1. Any of various short-tailed, burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae of North America, having fur-lined external cheek pouches. Also called pocket gopher.
2. Any of various ground squirrels of the genus Citellus of North American prairies.
3. Any of several burrowing tortoises of the genus Gopherus, especially G. polyphemus of the southeast United States.

Though this definition misses out the all important number 4.

4. A helper who runs back and forth with things or assists in any number of other ways. Derived from the phrase "go for" since a gopher will often go for this and go for that...

That got the boring definitions out the way. In the practical sense with regards to Amecon the gophers are a volunteer team who are pretty vital to making sure the con actually works. The committee alone can't do everything that is needed so people like me volunteer to help out and man video rooms, sell things at the bring and buy, do crowd control on queues for the dealers room and even just things like stopping to help out people who may be looking lost or confused.

I've now been to three anime conventions and been a gopher at all of them. Ame 04 was the first time and was relatively easy going. PArtly since disorganisation meant that I didn't get asked to do much. I sat in some video rooms and watched anime and made sure nothing broke and that only attendees of the con came in to watch. Aya in 05 was much the same although there I got to do security and crowd control at the blood gig. And realised that the cool thing about being a gopher is that you are allowed to go pretty much anywhere (within reason) and not even need to worry about queues.

The reason I volunteered at these things is because I like to be helpful. Ame I went to with a few other people but Aya and this years ame I knew nobody else going. Being shy as I am and not good at meeting people I became a gopher partly to meet new people. The gopher team and committee of these things are usually all very cool people who are fun to be with and as a gopher I get a chance to get to know them and become friends. If I wasn't gophering I'd spend far too much time at these things sitting around being bored and lonely and probably get depressed because I had no mates. As it was I got to meet and got to know loads of cool people and also I got to feel like I really contributed to the Con and helped to make it a success.

So, ame this year I decided to help with the setup and so I turned up (having checked first) on the thursday to help with whatever needed to be done. There was not a huge amount at first. I spent some time sitting in the games room (though it was more a room full of big piles of stuff since nothing had been set up). I helped unpack a couple of cars and then tagged along on a tour of the site so I could find out where the video rooms and event rooms were. Its really helpful to know these sortrs of things as a gopher because its hard to be helpful if you are clueless.

Over the course of the thursday much stuff got done. I helped set up the Games room which included putting up a gazebo as well as moving loads of boxes and stuff around. Had accomodation panics with one of hte other organisers whose room bookings had been lost in confusion somewhere and then did many hours of putting badges in alphabetical order... All the con-goers had badges with their names (not necessarily real names, just anyhting they asked to be put on it) and these were your proof of membership. They were given out at registration and its all ncie and simple.

The problem came because we recieved all the badges in alphabetical order by badge name but we needed to filter these into three sets by surname (so independant of badge name) and then order the badges by badgename again so they would be easy to find when given out. I suspect there are some simpler algorithms here (since it is just a filter) but the eventual system seemed to be to split them into three big messy piles and then order these again. To be fair I was happy to do that because it meant I wasn't in the other room stuffing the 1,300 con bags that needed to be filled with the various leaflets, conbook and silly toy.

Then pizza arrived and there was much rejoicing. One of the perks of gophering is that the committee are well aware of a) how much effort we put in and b) how screwed they'd be without us and so they pay/bribe us with food and other shinies (at the end). So several pizzas turned up and dinner was had.

Then there was something of a lull (for me at least) as things petered off and the only thing left was some last minute printing that needed to be done. So I went back to my room and got some sleep.

Next day, as previous posts imply, I got up and got myself breakfast (can't go wrong with bacon sausage and egg first thing in the morning). I then went up to ops where people were faffing and preparing for it all to kick off. And then I helped with registrations. It started off easy. I wasn't behing the desk but just helping with some light lifting and carrying. Queues were starting to form and things were nearly ready. ANd then it all kicked off.

People were filtered. People were told to stop queueing stupidly. Gophers managed the crowd, making sure they filtered correctly into the three queues based on surname and that the queues outside were well behaved. The queue had to go through a couple of revolving doors because it was so long and some people were morons. They were queueing *in* the revolving doors. They went in despite there being no room to get out and others followed themso the first person goes round nad just stops at the other side. The next person was then stuck half way round with no way in or out any more. And of course it was pretty hard to actually get in or out of the doors.

On the other hand I saw a fair few people with no clue on revolving doors. Two people going in the same section and thus not actually having space so the foor kept hitting the back person and so stopping and the front person then hit the door and they both ended up shuffling *really* slowly round. Or the people who I saw going through the door the wrong way and wondering why it was really hard to push...

Anyway, back to registrations. We were also having to shout at people to get out of the way of the dealers moving their merchandise through on large trolleys. We had a classic "please wait behind this line" style set up with cones but you know how well those things work... People were generally quite good though. After a while I ended up giving up on crowd control and moving behidn the desks to help with the con bags. I'm not sure how there were so many items not put in the bags the night before but the setup was one person did the paperwork (checking ID, confirming name, etc.) while their partner woudl get the bag ready with all the stuff, find the right badge and hand out the obligatory pocky. This worked pretty well. However, as the day wore on the gophers here died down and I ended up with the challenge of doing two and at times even three queues worth of bag stuffing.

In all fairness when I was doing three at least one of the queues was pretty much empty. And indeed the person I was helping was officially the slowest person ever. Every person he gave a little speech to. Not content to hand over the stuff and say what it was and "have a good con" or whatever he woudl give the smae little "THis might look like a raffle ticket. But its not. This ticket could be a trip to japan. It could also though just be a raffle ticket. The probablities of these two things is not the same..." And that was the raffle ticket. He was also handing over a con pack, badge, laniard and the pocky. He was taking noticeably longer per person than the others workign the desks. This is why I had plenty of time to do two or even three desks worth of bags. :)

In all fairness to him though he did put a lot of work into it and in respect of all this I wasn't rude to him and when he asked, genuinely confused, why the other two queues were empty and his still had at least 50 people waiting I politely left the question as a rhetorical one.

Having opened registrations at 10AM we finally got through most people by about 4:30 (or 4 for the first two queues) and at 5 we started to pack up shop. During this time I hadn't had a single break, except to go get myself a bottle of coke from the machine. I am not sure the others had either.

We'd got stuff up to ops and I was just preparing to do a runner when people came up and said "We need to register..." so back to it again. In the end I ended up doing more registering up in ops and was only saved by ops being locked up for the opening ceremony of the con.

I should probably say something about ops for the uninitiated. Ops is the Operations center where the con is managed from. Its where the committee can often be found if they aren't doing anything else as well as a lot of gophers. Its the first port of call for if you ahve problems that the nearest gopher couldn't help with and is generally a hub of activity. It was on the 4th floor (5th from a certain point of view since there was a mezzanine floor between ground and 1st) but luckily there was a lift. Right? Well, tehre was for a bit. It broke lots though. This meant that people had to use the stairs to get up. I was amused to see on the feedback forum complaints about this from people who had to go up to ops *twice* in one day. Most gophers were doing it at least half a dozen times a day and I know I did it a couple of times twice in about fifteen minutes. I do feel a lot fitter now. :)

Friday evening though this gopher rebelled a little and took his gopher badge off and stuck it in a pocket and became a normal person. I watched some anime (Elfen Lied) and then hung in the games room watching people play DDR and talking to some nice people (though Emma is the only name I remember and she was wearing pointy elf-like ears as the only part of her zelda costume she hadn't changed out of). Anyway, that's nothing to do with gophering...

Saturday's gophering duties were relatively light compared to the doom of Friday. There was back and forth, helping with some registrations for those that turned up on Saturday and the like. I helped somebody find the volume knob on a sounds system and then bullied people into giving me a gopher geek badge to say I was qualified to touch computers and stuff.

I wondered around quite aimlessly for chunks of the day. Popping my head into ops and doing some odd jobs of running things back and forth, getting some printing sorted and all that kind of thing. I then got to help out a bit at the masquerade. When I say help out what I really mean is I found myself a job to do that involved very little work and standing around somewhere with a good view of everything. I messed even my simple job up a bit though when not realising that there were more cosplayers than chairs to sit them on so messed up the seating arrangements that some othe rgophers were trying to get going. A huddled conversation in front of the catwalk stage soon sorted me out though and I decided to give up on being helpful and just stand and watch instead. :)

There was not a lot happening in the evening. I hung out in ops where there was much silliness going on. There were many in jokes going on and about three people reading this will know the one word answer that answers the following questions: "What is my mother's maiden name?" "Who am I going to the con with?" and "What is my favourite position?".

The calls going out on the radio were very funny as well.

Sunday I spent some time doing con stuff again. Watching some more anime and only occasionally popping my head into the omake to see if Weez (who may have an LJ - anybody?) needed help with stuff. I ended up doing some gophering during the performance. Mainly making sure people were seated sensibly since we had a fairly packed room. That age old problem of a row with two people sitting at either end with a big space in the middle. The "Who me? You can't possibly be tlakign to me" looks I got when I asked them to move down to use the space were quite amusing. Also being a gopher I sneakily reserved a few extra seats at the front so those of us gophering could get a decent view. :)

After that it was back to ops again where I like to think that I saved the day by pointing out that the big raffle we needed to draw in 45 minutes with 1,000 tickets still had all the tickets in their books and that maybe we should think about taking them out and putting them into another container... So we did that and some other stuff to preapre for the closing ceremony and then I confirmed whether we were locking ops. I was told we were so I offered to remain behind while somebody wenet to get a proter to lock up. The porter arrived and just as he'd locked up I got a radio call that something was needed so we unlcoked again and then more people came up and... In the end I think somebody actually went back and jsut re-opened it through the closing ceremony.

So I sat through the closing cermemony with a radio. Which was funny because I could here some of the sarcastic comments form back stage. And then that was pretty much it for work. I went home and got changed for the cosplay ball (just into dinner jacket stuff, not cosplay, I'm afraid) and then headed back, first to the gopher party. At the end of the con there is always a gopher party. A chance to chill and to drink and be merry and have more free pizza. Also the dealers all donate little knickkancks (though we have a theory that they know they are going to be asked and deliberately look for weird junk to give us) and the gophers get to take away some freebies. I picked up volume one of gunslinger girl which looked quite good.

And then I went with vast chunks of the committee and enjoyed the ball. I did a little bit of herding people out afterwards but mainly because I knew the security were going to be a lot more abrupt than I was and so I was trying to be nice and all that.

Monday morning I turned up to ops mainly to say goodbye. I was too lazy to help with any of the takedown but chilled with people a bit before going home.

And that was my weekend as a gopher. It was really fun thanks to the committee and other gophers. It was a lot of hard work and I do think that I should try a con at some point as a normal person. I'd think about minami but the hotel rooms like quite expensive...

So, one down. Next I'll probably talk about the anime I came across...

Edit: One thing I did forget to mention is that the committee also had food vouchers that the gophers had. I probably could have claimed more but I claimed basically enough to cover me for breakfast every day. Which was nice. I think that the con basically paid the venue for the amount used at the end of the weekend. I hope so anyway or the huge stack leftr over would have been a bit of a waste. :)