Rusty's Blog

We had a rather significant issue happen after convergence wrapped up this year. I had a short, immediate need to create a volunteer card drop box. I had already been handing out t-shirts, and was able to free up a box that I had brought in with t-shirts. I cut a hole in the top, used a marker to flag it a the Volunteer card drop Box, and directed people to drop their cards in the box as things progressed.

Somewhere along 5 pm on Sunday I dumped all the cards that had been dropped off into a separate box that I took home with me Sunday night, and did a first pass sort pulling out cards that had already had a T-shirt for working 15 hours or more as a volunteer at the convention, and left the box on the table.

Note that at no time have I indicated that the box had been decorated in preparation for being a card drop box. It had not.

In the past we had noted on the volunteer cards that the card drop box would be at Cinema Rex, and for whatever reason it was never there. So I advised the Bridge (our operations people) that the box would be available, and while working out where it would be, we ultimately decided to leave it at the volunteer desk. The combination of events turned into a bit of a mistake.

After we completed packing up the rest of the stuff for the volunteer desk, we honored our agreement with everyone and left the drop box at the desk, and left to come back and finish Monday morning.

So this morning, (Monday) I stopped by what had been convergence central, no box.

I stopped by the Bridge on the off chance that it had been moved there, no luck. So I wen tto where we have historically set up the Volunteers at con Monday morning, and waited.

It turns out that after we all left, the hotel cleaning staff made a final walk through and picked up everything that looked like trash. They folded up the tables, stacked and rolled away the chairs, took down all the remaining posters. Yes, anything that looks like trash. Including boxes that were not decorated. Like the Volunteer Card Drop Box.

So If you dropped off a volunteer card after 5:00 pm on Sunday, your card probably didn’t make it to the Volunteer department, as you trusted it would.

I appologize personally for my involvement, and I know that everyone else I have talked with on the board who has been involved has personally appologizes as well.

We would like your help. If you know you dropped off your volunteer card about the time Closing Ceremonies on Sunday, or after, Please send an e-mail to volunteers@convergence-con.org and let us know what badge number you had (if you still remember or have it) we would like to know that as well. Also any breakdown of departments, however

We do expect to be able to recover most of the information for most volunteers, but we know that there will be some people who’s hours are not going to be captured correctly.

So we will be doing things a little bit differently for next year. Granted I’m expecting not to be the head of the department next year. For that it is a given that things will be going a bit different.