Held Hostage by Artists

[elspethdixon]

This is the first time I've been on the internet in ages, having spent the past week running the front desk at the American Society of Aviation Artists' annual convention (meeting this year at the Navy Test Pilot School). Dear God, those people were disorganised. They could really take a lesson from anime conventions; Katzucon is always far better organised, and they've got hundreds of teenagers in costume running around, as opposed to a few dozen adults in their thirties, forties, fifties, and older. You wouldn't think grown men would need to be reminded three times a day to turn in their lunch order forms. It really drove the Navy guys nuts ("What do you mean, they don't have an accurate to the minute schedule written in military time? Do they even have a schedule? Why did they only start planning this last week? Are those paintings for sale? They're not? How about that one of the fighter plane over the Swiss Alps? You're sure?").

On the plus side, I got two pieces of free art (an oil and watercolour of a biplane in the clouds as a graduation gift from an old family friend, and a pen sketch of an F-18 in front of the TPS hangers that one of the artists had done as an exercise in perspective and geometry and wasn't keeping), and got to spend five days watching TPS students mill around admiring the art show. After four years at Hollins, being surrounded by a bunch of guys within five or six years of my age was a strange feeling. They all wear flight suits and have military haircuts and are next to impossible to tell apart.

Comments

[seanchai.livejournal.com]

Good to hear that you've survived, and had fun in the process.
And thirty to fifty year old men can be truly, terrifyingly disorganized when left to their own devices.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

I think my favourite moment was noon-fifteen on Tuesday when the three of us at the front desk got concerned that the caterers hadn't brought lunch yet, and called them, only to discover that, in a horrifying display of synchonised disorganisation, the ASAA had forgotten to tell them where to deliver the food, and the caterers had not noticed and had forgotten to ask.

"Well, sir, you drive through the front gate and keep going straight until you get to the big blue hangers with "Naval Test Pilot School" written on them in foot high letters."