Librarian Ire

I'm a Survivor.

Of ALA day 1. No small feat with the near riot this morning. Luck was with me and I barely missed the brou-ha-ha. Foolishly, I decided to get my exhibition pass this morning first thing (Its the greatest value of this conference, in my opinion). Well. Chaos. The registration area was about 1/4 of the size it needed to be, lines to different things blended together, no one was moving - no one knew where to go. I later heard that at about 10:30 they closed down the elevators up to registration and wouldn't allow people up. This made for a lot of angry librarians who were bottled up.

An hour and 20 minutes I trudged along, just about at the breaking point, I'll tell you. Finally I arrived to the 'invitation' registration and quickly typed in my info for the badge to print out. As an aside, you would not believe how slow most librarians type! Anyway, I get to the print out and I get screwed - of course. The lady rips the long print out between me and the person who went after me and begins updating with the person after me. My bunch of badges she threw on the counter. 15 minutes later, after I had yelled a bit (me and others!) she got me my badge and I was off. Of course, I had missed the first hour plus of exhibition time which means I didn't get first dibs on all the free books those most excellent publishers put out for us greedy gusses. Still, I was able to make quite a hall for day 1.

Highlighs of the day: Free cake, free ice cream dots, free candy, silly exhibitors wearing mules.

Lowlights: $8 chicken sandwich, $3 coke, and an Elvis Impersonator (gave me the creeps!)

posted by Loki at 8:33 PM