A 2020: back to the Westin

Text messages from two different people had come in at almost the same time, to the effect that they had just been thrown out of the M.J. O'Connor's pub off the hotel lobby for not having shoes. Why this was suddenly a problem now, as opposed to over the entire weekend, was a mystery, so I cruised upstairs to try and find out. By this point in the con we'd seen many people happily barefooting all over the hotel without interference, proudly sporting the brown ribbons expressing their full intentionality and that they knew what they were doing. I and others had randomly handed out quite a few of the ribbons to people who said they'd been looking for where to find them.
(bad cellphone shot)	But indeed, MJ's had suddenly gone reactionary foot-hostile, with nasty signs placed out front that they'd clearly just printed off and taped up. "You must have shoes on to enter this establishment" -- one out here, and another one inside at the desk. Not even the typical thing; this was very targeted, surly, impersonal hostility that had just begun that evening. The nonsense extended to City Bar next door too, under the same management, with another sign in front of that door. I steamed across the lobby to grab a 5-myths flyer from the stack at Info Desk, and then back to MJ's to try and impress some sense into whoever cooked up this insanity. The manager on duty insisted that it was "policy", offering the usual phobic "broken glass" excuse as justification. Even just to pick up takeout food, I learned later, with purchasers thereof forced to wait outside the restaurant space and have one of the staff bring it out past some nebulous division of area on the lobby floor.
I doubted I was going to get anywhere with the immediate haters present, given their recent and very sudden actions, but they took my flyer and gave me a card for the pub's general manager who wasn't there that night. The sad irony in this picture is profound. Painted on the door glass is the word "Fáilte", which is supposed to express a traditional warm Irish welcome. When you look up this word and its origins, you also find this article, containing in part There's a saying in Gaelic, "Céad Míle Fáilte". Its literal translation is "one hundred thousand welcomes", or "you are welcome, a thousand times, wherever you come from, whosoever you be." [Here's a quick pronunciation guide (mp3), lifted from this video.] Well, apparently not here as of Sunday night, unless you possessed some arbitrary token garment or adornment, which could have just as easily been a Red Sox cap, something with a shamrock on it, or a "vote in 2020" pin. Doesn't matter what, it's still the textbook definition of discrimination: picking one harmless attribute of another person or their presentation, and using it as an excuse to deny or diminish service. All the unfounded mythology in the world doesn't exonerate such superficial and unwanted minding of other peoples' business. "Failte" had been turned into "FAIL".

And this wasn't just going on at MJ's. Along my path of flyer retrieval, I received the second real kicker of the night right on top of that. Some friends sitting at a table in the lobby flagged me down and said that they had also gotten harassed about footwear in *that* area, the indistinct rectangle surrounding the bar area in *open lobby space*. That area wasn't under M.J. O'Connors jurisdiction, it was part of the hotel, so clearly something more widespread was going on. The abruptness of the ramp-up on these two fronts made it feel like a massive shoe-conspiracy had suddenly sprouted, targeted at Arisians as a means of puerile, vindictive harassment.

That transient feeling of triumph, not to mention existential safety, from meeting the new manager in the elevator rapidly deflated out of me. There was evidently more work to do here. I went back to Info Desk to grab another flyer, and took it back to the "Birch Bar" area in the lobby to try and find its manager to talk to. It took a while for them to bring someone out, but eventually Cynthia appeared and claimed that this "rule" was coming down from some faceless entity up the chain in Marriott or Westin corporate, out of anyone's control here on the ground but still mandatory to enforce. She actually already knew who I was, and said she'd previously read the "5 myths" sheet. Personally, she completely agreed that it was a ridiculous situation and seemed to admire the fact that some of us hike mountains barefoot, but at least this time around it was said to *only* apply to food-related areas. Which told me that someone up the corporate chain, if that origin was even correct, was buying into the old lies about food-service having any relationship to footwear. Cynthia seemed intrigued to learn more about why such tripe had never been true, and the history of how it came to be, and ultimately we actually had a pretty good conversation for a while, with me standing there barefoot the whole time, OMG *inside* the magic Birch rectangle. We were presumably still waiting for some other more senior manager to come out [not Steve; I believe Cynthia would have been totally candid about that if he was involved] who ultimately never bothered to.

She even suggested, almost laughingly except that she was serious, that the disposable white hotel-issue foam bedroom slippers would be "acceptable" under these so-called rules. But she apparently still wasn't in a position to simply back it all down as mistaken meddling. The upshot was that I spent most of the time that the Masquerade was running upstairs talking to managers, or waiting for them to show up. None of this even affected *me* directly, since I wasn't ordering food or drinks from either place but content to refuel in our Green Room. This was on behalf of everyone else at the con, a simple matter of civil rights and what we've worked for and collectively come to expect from our venue over the years. Arisia really needs to grow a SPINE and stand up for its constituents.

The conversation also carried an implication that the abrupt change of heart may have originated with or through our main event customer-service manager [CSM], Veronica, from the Banquets department downstairs. Their office is right across the back-of-house hallway from the main ballroom, and their staff sees a lot of us during the entire con. If it hadn't originated with her, she could probably tell me where it had come from and/or who the main contact was on the Arisia side. Now, I had seen Veronica's name go by quite a few times over the years in discussions about contracts and BEOs, which are the formal instructions for changes and setups the hotel makes during the course of an event. Veronica was said to be very good at her job and effective to work with, but I had never specifically met her myself. Maybe it was time, if it might help straighten this mess out. So when I went back downstairs for what little was left of Masq, I poked my head into the Banquets office to ask for her, but she had gone offsite for the night and would be back in the morning.

Not much else to be accomplished that evening; we wrapped things up and prepped the room for overnight airwall moves, caught a couple of libations in Tech Suite, and went to bed. One big plus that came out of Masquerade was a lot of leftover food being offered up in its greenroom, decent-quality wraps and salads from a fairly high-end sandwich shop, so a generous helping of that got hauled up to my room to as tasty supplemental fuel supply for the rest of the con. Which we could obviously eat in any state of dress, duh.

Monday

Crew call was again at 9am to begin tech strike, which I would be able to spend a few hours on before it was time to go get trucks. I tried again for Veronica in the Banquets office, and the assistant there said they'd track her down and send her to the ballroom I was working in. A little later the assistant found me and said Veronica would be out soon, but was "finding the information I needed". Which was interesting, because I hadn't detailed any particular issue to the other banquets staff. Anyway, Veronica eventually emerged and we had a mostly cordial meeting at long last. She was very familiar with Arisia and our technical needs and the contacts that she'd interacted with over the years, and said she always enjoyed the synergy of working with us.

But in her hand was a clutch of papers, which she then went on to describe. Here's where it started to get stupid. One was from a web page describing the hotel's amenities and service areas, notably the offerings for food and libations, carrying a suggested dress code of something called "smart casual".

(Pic: Wikipedia)

To support this, she had also printed out the Wikipedia page on this term [Linked via the image here] and pointed to the phrase within about "dress shoes". That webpage declares itself as very ambiguous and open to interpretation right up front, and this example image is so ludicrously *not* what we generally see at Arisia, that her argument was already starting to fall apart. Arisia isn't her usual stuffed-shirt corporate gig where everything is about expensive appearances, so trying to forcibly characterize our event this way was simply inappropriate. Her third item was a full printout of the recent Massachusetts health department letter from barefooters.org, which she said she had gotten from the *Massachusetts* state website but that's doubtful. That's where it is clearly stated that food and footwear have no relationship in law or code, but she was fixating on the ONE sentence at the end about local venue rules and laying that down as unconditional.

In retrospect, the combination of all this was just plain insulting, not to mention self-contradictory and irrelevant to our situation. It was actually a rather icy and one-sided conversation, with her doing most of the lecturing, while clearly dismissing most of my attempted counterarguments. She claimed that they already made a lot of "concessions" for Arisia's sake, but this "rule" about food functions wasn't going to be one of them. Without any sensible explanation of why.

But we had more important work to do, and I wasn't going to stand there all morning uselessly arguing with her. Her mind was made up, and not about to be confused with the facts. She gave me the sheaf of paper and wandered off, but as I continued the rip-n-tear and packing-up of strike I was able to clarify in my mind where she was most likely coming from. She deals with a lot of event-managers who come in under high stress and probably ask the world of her department, and it's her job to tell them "no" about a lot of things without seeming too obstinate. Also, I recalled having spotted her in one of the back halls earlier in the weekend before I knew who she was, but nonetheless took note of how she had rather pointedly glanced down at my feet before passing by, so that was another hint that she may have some personal phobic bug up her butt about it.

These groundless fears can and do reach the fervor of a bad religion with some people, just like any other false assertions that have been beaten into them since childhood by parental and social prejudice. This is usually where anyone starts learning the basics of hate; it plays on the unfortunate "us" vs. "them" tendency of patriarchal humanity. But I probably wasn't the right person to effect Veronica's re-training. I might have a possible ally in Steve, so I would simply present all of this to him later once I'd had some quiet time to sort it all out and assemble my thoughts and facts. I also got more of the story around events at the pub, including details on how flat-out rudely some of my colleagues had been treated over there, when in fact there had been not even a hint of this earlier in the weekend.

Therefore, getting poignant communication out to both of these management structures became the priority before I could really start on my general writeup. In both cases I sent an initial probe email, to ask if I could describe a significant and upsetting failure in customer service, and to make sure no spam-filters would impede the communication. Both entities returned a clear and concerned go-ahead, so I unloaded.

Here is my letter to Steve Juscen at the Westin.

I then sent an email to Donnie Hui with the MJ's and City Bar, containing much of the same rhetoric but reworked into his own context. In a later followup, the customer-relations lead at Briar Group expressed interest in what was going on so I forwarded that same piece with a little preceding wrapper for explanation.

Here is my resultant letter to Briar Group.

I received positively-toned and apologetic interim responses from both entities, which indicated that they had read through all of the content and would continue working the problem at their end. My position held unwaveringly that what happened was 100% dumbass, rooted in outdated nonsense, and needed to be rectified on their side and not ours. And every one of the people I had talked to has the individual right to speak out, to say no, to tell their powers that be that they will not marginalize guests in such a baseless manner and try to impose inappropriate "standards" where it's not warranted. Especially for a group as diverse as Arisia. Fixing it is as easy as an authoritative all-staff memo, essentially stating "this is not an issue at any time, don't try to make it one". Non-Arisia guests or visitors raising busybody objections should simply be reminded that it's none of their concern.

There was an update to this about three weeks later, just in time for Boskone, and a generally positive outcome for the barefooter community. I thus decided to attend Boskone for the first time in 33 years. It worked out really well, in fact, on several fronts. Read about it here.

I was really hoping I'd never need to have another "red section" like this in an Arisia writeup, but here it is. It may be my last. But don't start dancing in the streets too early, you never know, and everyone can still learn.

While the Grand Plan to send a truck to Storage every two hours on Monday was kind of a non-starter, they did eventually get usefully loaded and each one made a Storage run that night. Once again, reviewing the Zello log helped me recall and timeline how things played out. I had Artshow and other Galleria-side stuff in the first run, and we could still hear people coordinating all the collection and packing activities continuing back at the hotel. Lisa seemed dubious about sending the second truck, but it was ready and we already had an enthusiastic crew in Haverhill ready to unload, so we collectively convinced her. There was just enough time for a short dinner break for that crew before the second truck arrived; not the three-plus hour delay like last year. She needed my truck back sooner, though, so I skipped on dinner to start back, and our two trucks passed like ships in the night somewhere around the 93/495 interchange.
(bad cellphone shot)	It had snowed a bit over one of the nights and turned fairly cold, and the dock was an unpleasant mix of icy water and rock salt, but I don't think we carried too much of that into Storage on casters and feet. Things flowed back upstairs fairly well in general, with a minimal delay between truck arrivals, and we were all back in town and bumping the docks at the Westin in time to catch some food at the tail end of Dead Dog before loading up more stuff. Actually I think dead-dog was being mostly kept open by a dedicated Team Arisia crew that had set up camp in there to tally up all the timesheets, and that continued fairly far into the night.
We still had to finish emptying Grand before midnight as usual, and the remaining crew and gear there had meanwhile been forcibly squeezed into E so the next event's setup could begin in the other sections. A high-end production outfit called Ice 9 already had a truck in the next bay and was loading in a lot of roadcases while we were carrying scaffold and wheeling stuff out. I peeked into the back of AB later and saw really big fastfolds; it was clear they were on a complex all-night setup. After we'd finished I put that truck back on the Galleria side for the remaining NESFA stuff, and wound up loadmastering two trucks at once for a while. It had been a long day for all of us, though, and possibly the best expression of that landed in the Zello log around 11pm: "I am taking half an hour; I am dead." There's a note I made from that evening, confirmed by Kylie's report: the shuttle "Columbia", at a minimum, would need new casters. It had the problem we'd already seen on other wagons, where the outer softer plastic "tire" disintegrates and falls off in chunks. The remaining harder plastic inner disc will serve as a usable wheel for a while, but doesn't roll as well and won't last forever.

Arisia 2020: almost like we never left!