Pre-registration Hell, take 2. Dragon*Con’s typical attitude toward attendees seems to be, buy early, save money, wait in line forever; Buy day of, spend more, no wait at all. Not the best attitude toward your customers, but they did try something new with bar codes for pre-reges this year. We got in line at 11:45AM (it opened at 10AM) and the line was already the length of the hotel block, and within a half hour of no movement at all, the line wrapped around two sides of the hotel. The reason we were given for the stand still was that the computers went down. Really Dragon*Con??? You have every geek and nerd in a 50 mile radius here and we can’t keep a simple computer system going? *groan* Still once the computers were back online, the line did move pretty well. Our wait went from 4.5 hours last year, to just 2:15 this year. A 50% reduction in time, including a system failure, is a pretty good improvement. Many people ask why they don’t mail the badges to the members, and the given answer is due to forgery, but the unspoken answer is greed. The same reason they don’t cap pre-reg sales. Now the wait could have been even shorter, but, once I got to the end of the line, I was waiting for the next bar code reader to open, and I was removed from the line and taken over to the analog station where they tried to find me in the “Book”. I waited there for a good 10 minutes, and they couldn’t find my name. So they moved me to another bar code reader station, where about 5 different things were going on at once saying they would have to scan to look me up (this whole time I was watching where my blue registration card was traveling like a hawk). Then just before they were ready to scan my card, a guy claimed to find my name in the “Book”. Credit where credit is due, he did find Kevin Martin, but after I left the area and was looking over my badge, I saw it was a Kevin Martin from Canton, GA not Knoxville, TN. Now did I turn around and go back in and ask them to fix it? Oh, Hell NO!!! I’ve got my badge, I’m done. I was not going to back into the gerbil maze and smell the funk of hundreds of sweaty geeks anymore. If it bites me later, then so be it. Karma, but for now, I have a badge and that’s all I need.
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