Two years ago when we spent two hours waiting in line Thursday morning to gain admittance to an event we had already paid for, and for which we had our bar-coded admissions, our group determined that thereafter we would come down early on Wednesday for Preview Night. Available only to people with 4-day admission, Preview Night seemed an ideal solution:  Breeze in, get badged, check out the exhibit hall for a bit, then off to eating, drinking, poker, and such forth. Perfect. And last year that worked.

This year, everyone else had the same idea.

We approached the front of the San Diego Convention Center and were immediately struck by the size of the line: about four across, and stretching down the block. Our first debate was where the line began (or ended). Finally I picked a direction and started walking and everyone followed. We passed Convention Hall A, then B, then C, then D, then E, then F, and on and on, past all the letters, then past the park, then past all pavement, then we wrapped around, then we noticed that all the lines snaked back and forth, so everything we had passed was actually four times in length, as we continued to wrap around, and finally found ourselves behind the convention center. If the Con maxes out at 125,000 paid reservations (as it does), surely every single one of those people were in that line. We were dumbstruck. Everyone else was dumbstruck as well. No one had ever been in a line this long, this big, this hard to comprehend. Each of us was like an individual grain of sand on the beach.

Theories arose as to what would happen when some of us wouldn’t get in. After all, badge pickup was announced as ending at 8:30. We discovered that when it was 6:30 and we were halfway between the supposed front of the line and, well, oblivion. I told my son that if whoever was producing this event was smart, they would extend badge pickup, even if that meant paying union overtime to Elite (the crowd-control people). Consider the opposite:  Telling people that badge pickup was closed and running the risk of a very large and very angry crowd — and then compounding the potential problem of Thursday morning when the rest of the 125,000 people would arrive. We were weighing the pros and cons, and what we would do — stick it out? give up? — and whether or not we’d get into the premiere screening of the ballyhooed new J.J. Abrams show “Fringe,” when, astonishingly, the line started moving at hyperspeed. I have no idea who did what, but within minutes we were inside and picking up our badges.

In the day plus since then, I’ve been repeatedly impressed with the management of this convention. It’s a (large) non-profit, manned almost entirely by volunteers, with a volunteer board of directors, and all of those people are doing a fine job of dealing with an enormous crowd and doing it efficiently and with great sensitivity. At one point today I accidentally broke through one line and into another (I got confused about where the line wrapped around) and one of the volunteers stopped me and turned me around. When he saw me again a few minutes later, now in my proper place, he apologized. I said, “That’s okay. I wasn’t trying to cut. I just didn’t know which way to go.” But still he was apologetic in what could have been a trying and stressful situation.

Last night on the shuttle bus when I got up to get off at the Ralphs supermarket stop, the young guy in front of me made way for me and my large bag of con stuff to get by. “Thanks,” I said. “No problem,” he said. “It’s the Con. We have to be courteous.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.