| Current mood: |  pleased |
Last one out switch off the lights ...
... I took Tuesday off work as I knew I'd be helping strip down the hotel and get the ops kit back out to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
cobrabay's house in Wokingham (about 30 miles from the Radisson).
So Tuesday I got back to the hotel about 10:20am in time to see the long queues of people checking out from the hotel and a chance to say goodbye to a bunch of people. The next eight hours were spent in closing down the convention, packing things into boxes, buying a sofa (I believe there may still be a couple for sale, along with single seats and coffee tables), though you may have to arrange your own transport!), running around trying to reunite people with bits of kit, a quick lunch for all the volunteers, donated by the hotel(!) (especially the tech team who completed the stripping down of the main hall, the disassembly of the stage, the taking apart of all the sofas etc.), and shuttling cart after cart of kit down to the various cars and vans leaving the con. ... including waving goodbye to a big pink pig which will be heading over to the US shortly (I hope they don't have problems with importing British livestock!). We also sat and discussed some of the things that had gone better than expected and some of the things to improve next time, notes were taken. We also read out some of the early conreports that were appearing on the lists to keep up the spirits of those working away on packing and stripping stuff down.
There was one great humanitarian disaster though ...
... there were two half full kegs of beer left (London Pride and Spitfire I think), and while the hotel could return the unopened kegs, those two had to be paid for by the con, so it was free beer for anyone that wanted any ... and since we were all driving or worn out from the end of con, no one wanted any. *sob*
Mid-afternoon in my wandering around making sure all the signage was down, I discovered the entire photowall was still up in the Atrium, so twinfair and A^3 took it to pieces (I don't know what happened to it after that, but two DVDs of all pictures collected by the photowall team have been passed on to twinfair for the production of the souvenir book ... keep sending in your photos and con reports!). A^3 loaded Vince (our treasurer) into his car and they headed off to the airport (Vince claimed to be flying home, but I didn't know he lived in Rio?), and by 6pm everyone was gone aside from me and Eddie (I'm sure there were a few stragglers of attendees elsewhere in the hotel, but as the last convention function room, we were the end of the con!)
At 18:30 we loaded the last trolley of ops kit, and ceremonially took down the Ops Room sign and ceremonially retrieved the blue white tack used to hold up the sign (can't have been blue, though it appeared blue-ish, as our hotel requirements said strictly white tack only! :-) ) and Eddie closed the ops room door for the last time and it magically turned back from a place of wonderment and delight (ahem) to just another boring convention function room named Windsor.
We gave the trolley back to the hotel, got the parking ticket validated and drove off into the sunset. Dropped off the ops kit in Wokingham and then did a run down to the Chinese for an evening meal, watched a bit of the Stargate movie that had been on over Easter ... but by this time I wanted to be home while I was still awake so I eventually got home about 22:30, and was in bed asleep about 30 minutes later (my earliest night all weekend, by an average of about four hours!)
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
orbital_2008,
