[221] in APO News
convention experience
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (mosquito@MIT.EDU)
Sat Jan 2 14:47:01 1993
From: mosquito@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 93 14:44:21 -0500
To: apo-news@MIT.EDU, apocrypha@MIT.EDU
My Personal Reaction to the National Convention
Well, in response to Glenn's call for experiences at Nationals, I'm
writing this. I've already written a more "objective" view of what
happened to apo-l and I'm forwarding that to the apoc, also, but this
is to give my personal reaction: how I feel about what happened.
The convention went very well. I have mixed feelings about this, because
although I'm glad for the fraternity because of it, this has caused me a
great deal of frustration.
I got involved in staffing an information booth, floor services,
sergeant-at-arms, printing and publications, security, and a few other
things. This I had expected. What I did not expect was a feeling of
frustration that I wasn't contributing. Or, perhaps more precisely, I
was told something needed a lot of help, I volunteered, and I found I
wasn't needed. This is usually fine except that this happened to me a
lot.
The information booth pleaded with me to sign up for hours, which I did;
and I found not many people came to the information booth. When I got to
floor services (after being misdirected a few times) I was told they didn't
need me. This was after someone had pleaded with me to sign up for hours
as they didn't have enough workers. Same with sergeant-at-arms. When I
volunteered to help with Printing and Publications, often the response was
"We're all set. Except we need articles. Want to write an article?" After
convincing a few people to write articles and reserving the space for some
of them, and spending 5 hours doing a survey, I returned to discover
they had already finished putting the lightbearer together and would not
accept the articles, even the ones for which I had reserved the space.
They apparently had too many articles. And none of which were written by
the ones I had convinced to write. When helping with security I found
that everything was very quiet and once there were many more security
people than non-security people. And so on. I asked myself if it was
worth asking anymore if anyone needed help. I asked myself if I had just
wasted time trying to help when what I did didn't help at all.
I think what was going on was organizers, under a lot of stress, desperately
asked for help, and because there were more than 2000 brothers there, it
didn't take long before all of a sudden, there was too much help. Everyone
had organized everything so efficiently that with a few brothers the
job could still happen, and when there were many brothers the job happened
almost too efficiently.
Now I'm glad for all of this, and as President Gerry Schroeder said,
if you're going to have a problem, having too much help is the problem to
have. But I felt disappointed, having travelled 2000 miles, only to
discover I didn't need to.
I did see a lot of people I hadn't seen in a long time, and got to tell them
all I was at Stanford, and I did find out a few things I could take back to
my chapter at Stanford, and I was able to tell the other people from Stanford
what I could about Boston, so I don't regret going. It was just a let-down.
That's all.
