Getting Nervous
I still haven't heard from the Detour alley staff about my table, so I went to the site. The alley page was still showing the same registration information as when it went live on October 1, and there was no list of confirmed Alley participants, so I checked the forum.
The staff there have indicated that the alley people do not read the forums, so you have to email them directly. They then go on to say that the alley people are not answering their email. People have been waiting for weeks on time-sensitive correspondence. They say to just send payment for the table, and if it gets cashed, to consider the table secured. I am not comfortable with this.
Even more troublesome is the fact that the staff member posting in the alley forum states that the Alley was nearly full in September, a month before the registration went live. There was a line about "if you submitted your form around 9/15 you should be okay" but I was checking the site daily at that time, and there was no form.
This indicates to me that they may have been allowing groups to jump the line. Those of us who registered on opening day might be shit out of luck because nobody in the know told us about the REAL opening date. If this is the case, I'm not impressed.
I dig that these folks are running the convention as a hobby. I am fully cool with their real life jobs coming first. But they have customers, and I am not ok with treating customers carelessly, especially not in this shitty economy. As an artist for hire, I screw up from time to time, but I don't snap at people for being concerned. I don't get indignant when somebody wants to give me money and can't do so because I'm nowhere to be found.
If my circumstances cause problems for people who have invested time, money and trust in me, I apologize and try to make it right. That is what's expected of me as a provider of services. If I don't feel up to that, I'm not going to continue to hang up my sign in bad faith. You have to be realistic about this stuff.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe when the forum posts referred to the Alley as having been mostly full in mid-September they really meant mid-October. And maybe they just haven't gotten around to sending out requests for payment because of the backlog. Maybe. I sure hope so, anyway. But this Flaky Ghost Staff issue is a huge problem with a lot of conventions I've been to. It's a major reason for me scaling down the number I attend. If your customer support policy is literally "I don't have time for you because I'm not getting paid to help you" then the system is broken.
So I emailed to ask about my table, but I'm not entertaining high hopes for a response in anything like the amount of time required for me to do my own preparation.
The staff there have indicated that the alley people do not read the forums, so you have to email them directly. They then go on to say that the alley people are not answering their email. People have been waiting for weeks on time-sensitive correspondence. They say to just send payment for the table, and if it gets cashed, to consider the table secured. I am not comfortable with this.
Even more troublesome is the fact that the staff member posting in the alley forum states that the Alley was nearly full in September, a month before the registration went live. There was a line about "if you submitted your form around 9/15 you should be okay" but I was checking the site daily at that time, and there was no form.
This indicates to me that they may have been allowing groups to jump the line. Those of us who registered on opening day might be shit out of luck because nobody in the know told us about the REAL opening date. If this is the case, I'm not impressed.
I dig that these folks are running the convention as a hobby. I am fully cool with their real life jobs coming first. But they have customers, and I am not ok with treating customers carelessly, especially not in this shitty economy. As an artist for hire, I screw up from time to time, but I don't snap at people for being concerned. I don't get indignant when somebody wants to give me money and can't do so because I'm nowhere to be found.
If my circumstances cause problems for people who have invested time, money and trust in me, I apologize and try to make it right. That is what's expected of me as a provider of services. If I don't feel up to that, I'm not going to continue to hang up my sign in bad faith. You have to be realistic about this stuff.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe when the forum posts referred to the Alley as having been mostly full in mid-September they really meant mid-October. And maybe they just haven't gotten around to sending out requests for payment because of the backlog. Maybe. I sure hope so, anyway. But this Flaky Ghost Staff issue is a huge problem with a lot of conventions I've been to. It's a major reason for me scaling down the number I attend. If your customer support policy is literally "I don't have time for you because I'm not getting paid to help you" then the system is broken.
So I emailed to ask about my table, but I'm not entertaining high hopes for a response in anything like the amount of time required for me to do my own preparation.