Rick and I wound up butting heads.  The tl;dr is that I pushed a printer
that was ready to go down to the loading dock area and intended to load it
on the truck after everything else like he'd asked, but he didn't want to
do it that way.  There's a Merv-grade rant behind this, however.

The situation was fucking stupid.  First, Rick had me remove a small IDE
hard drive from the printer's guts -- involving a dozen or so screws on a
side panel with a tiny useless pocketknife type screwdriver.  The drive was
in a perfectly good bracket mounted solidly inside and had presumably been
properly shut down and parked, but Rick swore that if it remained in the
printer it would be trash after shipping.  Fine, I'm all for taking care
of hard drives so I understood this and didn't object -- it just took a
while.  Then with the panel back on and the cords bundled up the printer
was all ready to go, and since nothing else in the Ops room was moving yet
[because it was all single-threading through Rick and he wasn't giving
anything like direction at all, good or bad] I pushed the printer downstairs
to stage it in the hall near  hotel security -- like we'd been doing with
*everything else* all weekend, and in fact it was right near some of the
*hotel's* own printers that tend to live in that same area.  Rick's printer
was tucked out of the way of other hallway traffic, near the fedex racks
opposite the doors with the plastic flappy things.  It could easily wait
there until the rest of truck load was done, but as all of his printers are
a bitch to move [crappy wheels, topheavy] I wanted to at least take care
of as much gear-moving as possible during what would otherwise have been
logistical downtime.  He never said "no, leave that here" as I headed out
the door of Ops with it.

So then Rick exploded, and wasted another 20 minutes not packing stuff but
going all the way down to the dock to fetch the damn thing all the way
back *up* to Ops by himself, convinced that the hotel was going to drop
something heavy on the paper-handling plastic bits on top and thereby
somehow completely total a $10,000 printer.  Not only is the logic of this
flawed and the printer as far as I could tell was completely safe where I'd
put it for a couple of hours, he then tried to twist his "thinking" around
to dump on what I tell people about the wiggle-lights, e.g. don't move them
around double-stacked because the wheel pockets on top are kind of shallow
and the upper case might bump off.  That doesn't relate at all, as preventing
stacks of wiggles falling apart is as much for the safety of those *moving*
the cases as much as that of the contents.  Those printers get far more abuse
in the simple process of moving out of Rick's garage or Storage to the con
and back than they would have sitting quietly in the hotel's back-of-house.
And yet he refuses to put real dollies under them.

Then as Angela and I were loading this one -- the biggest, heaviest and most
topheavy of the lot, I had a hand hooked under one of the lower edges to
lift the tiny little mostly-useless casters over various bumps in the dock
plate and the goddamn thing caught my fingers pretty hard on the edge of
something at the back of the truck.  So not only did this printer seed
unnecessary mental anguish, it drew blood.

My assertion will remain that Rick was totally out of line here, and wasted
even more of everyone's time over nonessentials.  This is why my con report
specifically states that I'm never touching Rick's fucking printers again.
Yeah, I'm naming names here, because proper perspective can be important.
Wearing my logistics hat had me trying to keep crap moving to and from
trucks, but if that's not the function of logistics then I guess I have
completely misunderstood the role.

If you think some of us are poor at productive delegating, Rick takes
the cake.  Ask anyone else who's had to work with him.  And *he* keeps
talking about burning out "people points"... that's like the 45-foot
yacht owner griping about fuel prices.

_H*