Waiting for my mom to finish a phone call before we take off, so in the meantime I know I still need to talk about Tokyo in Tulsa.
...wow.
I know it's not kosher to give your personal opinions about a con and badmouth it, so I'm not going to do that. I know putting on a con is a horrendous job. Instead, I'm just going to state facts of The Way Things Were.
1) The AA was in the same room as the Dealers, and we were thus required to keep the same hours as the dealers. Which meant closing by 7 in the freakin p.m. We weren't allowed to open until 2pm on Friday. Two o'clock in the afternoon.
2) The AA/DR was in the convention center with one gaming room. Everything else in the entire con was across the street in the hotel.
3) The convention center was in the middle of being renovated. Granted this was completely out of TnT's control, but still. There was dust EVERYWHERE, but thankfully it was at least bearable by the time the con started.
4) Because of the renovations, the front doors of the convention center were un-usable due to their being no stairs leading to them. This meant that the only way to access the convention center was via the skyway. This has got to be one of the most retarded skyways I have ever seen. Again, not TnT's fault. In order to access this skyway, you had to:
- Go to the second floor of the hotel
- Go out to the parking garage
- Take the hot, slow parking garage elevators down to the third floor
- Go around a corner to the skybridge which was long and not air conditioned. It was over 100 degrees all weekend.
5) There was absolutely
no signage telling con goers where we were or how to get to us. I had one customer stop in front of my table and call her friends on her cell to tell them she had
found the artists. According to TnT, signage went up on Saturday afternoon. I... never saw any, but that could just be me being blind which is a very real possibility.
We were basically hidden from everything and everyone. A lot of the dealers started packing up at 2:00 on Sunday even though the con was open until 5:00. It was that slow. I started packing up at 2:30 because most of my visitors for the last hour had been other artists in the alley that were wandering around due to boredom. I did a little of that myself earlier in the day. I've
never been able to do that during a con.
Packing up early ended up being a good thing for us since we had to drive 300+ miles back home and it was well after 10:00pm by the time we got home. We also hit a monster coyote on I-35 just past Gainesville on our way home. It took out the bottom part of my dad's bumper, tore out part of the wheel well, knocked out a sensor, knocked the passenger side of the bumper loose, and put a big hole in the windshield wiper tank. The car is now in the shop. Did I mention the car is only 4 months old? X|
I'm not going to be going back next year because my bottom line just can't justify it. I
barely broke even and judging from what other artists said when I was wandering around, I was lucky to have done so. My neighbor lost quite a bit of money and I don't understand it because her work was beautiful.
Live and learn, I suppose. At least AFest is in September.