I’m waiting for my turn in the bathroom here in our suite at the Embassy Suites in San Diego, so I figured I’d take a few minutes to document some of yesterday’s convention experiences.

First, a note about this hotel and how it’s changed. Here’s how it’s changed:  Some pencil-pusher has taken a serious look at how to gouge every guest in ever-more-clever ways.

• How much is the overnight guest parking? I seem to recall it being 22 bucks a night in the past (not cheap in itself); this year, it’s 30.  That’s the rate for people staying here; for people not staying here, it’s 30 bucks, plus another liver for Steve Jobs.
• Yesterday two of us went down for breakfast (they have a big breakfast buffet, with made-to-order grill, free for guests). A guy stopped us and asked for our “breakfast cards.” Reacting off our expressions, he said that each guest is (now) offered a breakfast card, and that we’d need to get ours at the front desk. Scowling — remember, it’s early, I’m not such an early person, and there’s still been no coffee in my system — we trundle over to the front desk. There’s a crowd there like the people trying to get on the last lifeboat off the Titanic. Because I’m not sure we’ll need to wait in that line, I yell over it to the lone person working the front desk, “Breakfast card?!?!?!?” She ignores me. Finally another person comes out to help the front desk, and finally it’s our turn, and I tell her we need, really need, our breakfast cards, and now. She then asks for, wait for it, photo ID. At which point I say, “COME ON!” So she just hands them over. We head back over again to the breakfast bar, and now the guy sees our little paper cards and scratches off the “Thursday” spot on each. We then proceed to sit down and eat, I’m just estimating here, a hard cost of about 85 cents each in breakfast, against our $285 room. Insulting? You bet.
• Terence, one of our con cohort, fires up his laptop and orders the wifi. It’s $12.95 a day. Remember the days of free wifi in your room? I’m here to tell you that, all across the land, that has gone the way of Republicans gleefully raising the debt ceiling with no cause for alarm (as they did no fewer than SEVEN TIMES during Bush the Younger’s term, when somehow evidently it didn’t merit a moment’s notice). It’s over. So Terence is on his laptop and on the internet, and I’m ready to do the same, but then I make a realization:  Hey, wait a minute. I’m betting that they’re taking that charge off individual ISP addresses, so the charge isn’t for wifi for the ROOM, it’s per device. So I call the front desk and, sure enough, it’s going to be $12.95 per laptop. Even though I’m using the same wifi. Calculated this way, they should be charging us per-person for the air. One of us heads down to the lobby to use the free wifi emanating from the hotel Starbucks, or in the hotel lobby. Nope, that’s all gone too. It is indeed now $12.95 per laptop.

This year, for reasons I’ve pledged not to divulge, I have a Professional pass to the Con. This means that I was able to circumvent both the two-and-a-half-hour wait at Hotel Circle for badge pickup, plus the endless line getting into the Con itself. Once inside, because I knew I’d be waiting in lines elsewise during the Con, I went and stocked up on trade paperbacks at half-price. I also made a stop at the booth of the much-loathed Fantagraphics guys because they had a 50% off sale and they had some comics I wanted. Here was the single most entertaining check-out experience of my 23 years of attending the San Diego Comic-Con International:

Me, to checkout guy, a grizzled washed-out, strung-out mid-40’s guy sitting at a card table with a giveaway pocket calculator next to an equally clueless young woman with a scratchpad and a pen: “I’d like these comics.”

I hand him six comic books, each equally priced at $4.95 cover. He pulls over that pocket calculator and here’s what he punches in with his thick clubby fingers:  4.95 plus 4.95 plus 4.95 plus 4.95 plus 4.95 plus 4.95 (surely, most of us would have entered 6 times 4.95) and now he’s hesitating; he’s unsure what button to push. I decide to just watch this. He turns to the girl and says:

“Oh, shit. They’re half off.” I can see him mentally calculating how to ring up $2.475 each, if he can even do the math on what that half would be.

She tries to instruct him in how to take half off, but it doesn’t work — because he never hit the equal sign, which means that now it’s just a stuck number that even he can see is wrong.

So I say helpfully: “It’s 6 times 4.95 times .5 times 1.sales tax.”

They both look up.

I say again:  “It’s 6 times 4.95 times .5 times 1.sales tax.”

They’re still not following me. So I say, “What’s the sales tax?” And the girl says — honest — “The sales tax is the money we have to collect for the state.”

Me: “Yes. HOW MUCH IS THAT?”

Him:  “We don’t know. We’re trying to figure that out.”

I don’t know the sales tax rate because a) it just dropped in California, and b) it’s different by county. Finally they produce a sheet of instructions they’ve been given by someone who actually believed they would be able to ring up sales, and on the top it says that the tax rate is .775%. So now I tell them “It’s 6 times 4.95 times .5 times 1.0775.” And the guy punches that in and looks up and says with awe, “That’s 16 bucks.” Which sounds right to him. I pay it and judging from their behavior, it’s like they’ve been visited by someone with otherworldly powers.

I’ve got to get into that shower now so that Terence and I can go pose with “Walking Dead” zombies like we’re chained to a rooftop (you Season One viewers will understand that). Here’s  quick rundown of the rest of the first day’s activities:

•  I went to the panel on former DC publisher Paul Levitz. Now I want to read his book, about 75 years of DC history.
• Paul, Terence and I went to see Penn & Teller talk about their new Discovery Channel show and do a little stage magic. It was somewhat disquieting when Teller actually talked — he’s soft-spoken and although I have no idea where he’s from, he sounds like a little Jewish guy from Brooklyn. (Not what I expected.)
• I caught the tail end of the Mad magazine panel.
• We had a bite to eat at some seafood restaurant; I had the mussels.
• After a spell in the jacuzzi and a trip to Ralphs for supplies (chiefly alcohol, with a little food), we played poker and on nickel-dime-quarter poker, I somehow folded one card before revealing a flush that would have won me a $10 pot on, again, nickel-dime-quarter poker. Argh!

More soon.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 22nd, 2011 at 8:20 am and is filed under Comics, 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.