The Con Man
2005-09-14

Well, Mrs Sprout and her handsome husband are currently gearing up for their very first Dreddcon! Accommodation has been booked, tickets have been bought, money has been converted, mother-in-law has been booked for cat-sitting duties. All that remains now is to wait a couple more weeks, pack our bags, programme the video to record Casualty, and then off we go!

We've attended many, many cons before, so we're not exactly newbies at this sort of thing. A couple of times we've even run conventions, so I have every sympathy for the organisers of Dreddcon, whomever they may be, and I hereby offer my services as "Official After-The-Fact Pointer-Out Of Things That Could Have Been Done Better".

Y'see, running a convention isn't exactly as easy as it may look to the casual observer. The committee members have to decide on a venue, attempt to book it, learn that it's already booked for their chosen weekend, argue whether it would be better to change the dates or change the venue, decide on a different venue, put up with the AGCM (Annoyingly-Gripey Committee Member: by law, every committee has to have one member whose sole task is to complain about how things would be so much better if everyone listened to him, notwithstanding the fact that he never says anything worth listening to), book the different venue, argue about which guests to invite, struggle to find a way to contact the desired guests, fail on most counts, panic over the budget quite a bit, publicise the event, organise a pool on which guests are going to let everyone down at the last minute... And that's just the first couple of weeks.

There's also tremendous fun to be had with the potential attendees: there will always be at least one who is the counterpart of the ACGM. This person, usually a precocious fourteen-year-old boy, will appear out of nowhere claiming that he's sent in his membership form and money, but hasn't yet received his tickets. Then, before you can do anything about it - such as telling him that most conventions don't actually use tickets - you'll get a letter from his Dad. This letter will express annoyance and disappointment at the "shoddy treatment" his son has received, and it will be written in great flowery language in an attempt to give the impression that Daddy is a high-powered solicitor and not actually a salesman for Weetabix.

Then there's the programme: There's an old joke that con-runners are fond of repeating endlessly: "the programme of events isn't finalised until two days after the convention." It's true, though... Most conventions take place over a weekend, and they generally have two different programming streams, a video room, and a dealers' room. No matter how clever the organisers are, somehow one of the guests will be scheduled to appear on two separate panels at the same time. Luckily, this will be spotted very early on, but unluckily any attempt to rectify the situation will only make it worse: you can put the guest on a different panel at a different time, but it'll either be one in which they're not interested, or there'll be someone else on that panel with whom they don't get along. Plus there are the problems of trying to get any necessary equipment to the room at the required time, finding someone who knows how to set it up, and discovering the day before the convention that the key panellist can't arrive until an hour after the panel is scheduled to end. Not to mention that very often there are guests who don't understand that if they're due to be on a panel at two in the afternoon it's not really a good idea to book lunch in a far-away restaurant for one-forty-five.

During the event itself, there are other kinds of annoying attendees: the "seen it all before" blokes who will spend the entire event in the bar and then make snide comments to everyone about how the event is rubbish even though they haven't actually seen any of it; the somewhat disturbing fans who invariably turn up in a Starfleet uniform even though your event might have nothing to do with Star Trek; the even more disturbing fans who want to take you aside to show you their invention; the quiet ones who turn up at every convention and never speak to anyone and now you can't talk to them because to do so would be to acknowledge that you've completely ignored them for over a decade; the girl who has brought along her collection of live hedgehogs; the guy who has brought along his collection of dead hedgehogs; and the guys who are planning to run their own event in a couple of months and are only attending yours so that they can snag all your good guests.

You also have to put up with the AGCM who has finally split from the committee and stalks the venue's corridors hoping to corner timid-looking attendees so he can take credit for all the good bits and insist that anything that didn't work was something he'd argued against; the discovery that your venue liaison person - who completely and utterly understood exactly what the event was all about and was one hundred per cent behind it - won't actually be on-duty during the weekend and will be replaced by a cretinous jobsworth whose motto appears to be "Oh, I don't know about that..."; the guy you barely know who thinks you're his absolute best friend in the whole world and insists on telling you the entire plot of the novel he's planning to one day write (a novel that is in no way unlike an episode of Star Trek); the know-it-all who has scoured through the convention's programme book and hands you a copy in which he's highlighted all the typos - some real, some purely imaginary - and thinks he's being helpful; and the committee member who has never quite understood the meaning of "you have to be there on time" and turns up six hours late on the first day - naturally, he'll be the one who insisted on looking after the cash box and / or the membership list.

It's all a bit like trying to shave a frightened buffalo using the blade from pencil-sharpener. In the dark. Underwater.

So why do we do it? Well, this particular person (me) doesn't do it any more: Con-running is a thoroughly exhausting job, and anyone who thinks they might like to give it a go because that way they'd be assured of meeting their favourite artist or writer will be in for a shock: the committee members never get to actually enjoy the event because they're running around in absolute panic while at the same time trying to perfect a casual, cheerful expression that's supposed to convey the impression that absolutely nothing has just gone horribly wrong and everything is fine no matter what you might have heard and isn't it a lovely day?

There's also another problem with conventions: after two exhausting days of running about getting stuff done and trying to be friendly when all you really want to do is lie down and wait for death, it takes weeks to return to normal life... You catch yourself meeting people and staring at their chests because you've become so used to taking a quick glance at a convention-goer's name badge so you can pretend to remember them. It becomes impossible to drive past any large structure without wondering whether it might make a good venue for next year's convention (despite the fact that you've been drilling the mantra "never again!" into your brain ever since the convention began)... You can become completely lost in that vast, untapped, all-but-forgotten temporal landscape known to normal people as "evenings and weekends".

Again: why do we do it? Well, George Leigh Mallory said it best: "Because it's there." Except, of course, conventions aren't there until someone runs them. This is pretty much the whole point of conventions. Yes, every convention will attract people who complain about it, but that's okay. That's part of the package. To quote someone else (Abigail Freemantle in Stephen King's The Stand): "The chicken's a little tough, but it's a hell of a lot tougher when there's none."

Mrs Sprout and I have attended well in excess of fifty conventions and similar events throughout Europe, and only a couple of them have been rubbish (in both cases, they were events run solely by well-meaning but completely inexperienced fans who thought that it looked easy). In fact, the general rule seems to be that the more harassed-looking the committee, the better the convention will be: this is because they've sacrificed so much of themselves purely for our enjoyment.

So I urge you... If you've never attended an SF or comic convention before, do your best to go along to the next Dreddcon, Octocon, Comic-Con, Mecon, Moniaive Festival or any other event that looks interesting. It'll be a lot of fun, and you never know: you might even find a sympathetic committee member to whom you can either explain in detail the plot of that novel you're going to write, or show off your brilliant new invention! Plus it'll be a nice little outing for your hedgehogs.