#acen2019

To start with I will give kudos to the two young staff ladies that helped me out in the DESCC, Baily I belive was one, and I didn’t get the other young ladies name. Thank you both for trying to help me out. And I did appreciate the large banners announcing the room. I’ll also say that the two people I met at Con Ops were very polite to me. 

However...here’s where things become annoying. There were no signs saying what was in what room. No one was at the doors to keep a line going, and help out if there was a tech problem. People seemed to be wandering around and peeking into rooms to see what was going on to guess what the panels were about as there was no way to tell what was going on there as there were no signs. 

So we found the room, and I was inquiring about if there was an HDMI cord for the projector. As I said above, Acen has a bunch of cables for the different PCs, and I should say that Midwest's Con Ops said they could provide me with one, however, they also said that we should have brought them ourselves, but I’ll get to that soon. We could see you could use the projector, meaning that there was a monitor cord on there for the projector to hook up to the laptop, if you had a connector for it. But, some older cords don’t work well with certain laptops, and without it...you’re screwed when it comes to showing off your powerpoint. 

So I asked the ladies on staff about it. They didn’t know and were trying to get in contact with Con Ops about it. Not tech, but Con Ops. Now I know that smaller cons can put the groups under one unit, but given the size of this con, even if it is smaller than Acen, you would think that there would be a split off by now. So I was recommended to go to Con ops, after being informed that it would take some time to get an answer by text. Understandable. 

We, that would be my sister and I (she’s my co-panelist), head for where the Con Ops area is. Here we have two gents in suits waiting and I asked if they were con ops. Nope, turns out there was one lone young man working there, on a Friday night. Thankfully he was able to get his Manager to come out and speak with us, but it took a rather long time as it was only her and him, again, on a Friday night. 

So as I said, we were informed by the Manager that they could give us an HDMI, but they would rather we bring our own. Again I can understand this, but again, it’s weird to not at least have a set up for different Laptops for that projector. So we went to the panel room at our designated time, and thankfully the monitor cord worked...but we lost out on several people who were looking for our panel because...again...no signs. Just because it’s on the website doesn’t mean that the room may not change and people don’t constantly want to look at the damn phone to know what’s happening and what’s not. 

Again, no one there to help us with the setup, no one there to give the other panelists warning for time, etc. The whole thing felt out of wack. 

Other issues that seemed to be going on, was that there were signs warning others to watch out for drunk people at the bar, I have no idea where security was at the time. I know my friend got catcalled on her way to the convention outside of it. And another cosplayer, male, was saying that while in costume guys kept bothering him and trying to flip his skirt and such. 

This is not to mention that a number of Acts couldn’t make it to the convention due to bad work with their Visas, and while the con issued an apology, they took no action during the con to update that Lia, one of the acts who came from Japan -and who managed to get in -held a Q&A and Anime Midwest did not update that there was going to be this meeting. Apparently, no one showed up for that.  

The line to get into the con was 2 hours long, and apparently longer on Saturday. Autograph lines only had 4 people, at most, working them, and the attendees seemed to have to monitor it themselves. Artist Alley was way too tight and it was hard for a person who could walk to get around, I would hate to have to think about anyone in a wheelchair trying to get through that mess.