Saturday, June 29, 2013

Prompt: Living your horoscope

Your intuition is a powerful force today -- so keep pushing yourself to dig deeper and learn more about those around you. Everything should start to make more sense by sometime tonight.

Today was the first day of ConTemporal, the 2nd annual steampunk convention in Raleigh, NC. About a month ago, their head of registration had to step down, and they asked me to run reg. I’ve never run a con reg, though I’ve run many other aspects of cons over the years. And I’ve run reg for business programs from 12-500 people, so this wasn’t completely foreign ground to me. However, stepping in on such short notice meant that I was playing catchup on planning and decisions made months earlier. So I did the best I could to prepare and expected a fair amount of onsite chaos.
 
I wasn’t disappointed.

But happily, the chaos wasn’t really reg-related. In fact, we didn’t have any major reg problems, and nothing that wasn’t easily handled by my stellar staff and volunteers.
 
So how does this related to my horoscope for today? Well, reg is really all about people. Some come in and know what they need, some don’t. Some are in a good mood and happy to be there, some aren’t. Some have easy questions, some take a little more work. I’m a people person, and this is what I do well. Help people. Fix problems. Find answers. Make their day better.

For example, a lovely older lady came in late this evening to see a former student of hers, with whom she had traded emails, as he was performing on stage tonight. In the course of conversation, she talked about some of the challenges she had that day, and I didn’t want to add to them. It turned out that by the time we figured out when he was performing, he was already on stage. I told her to go in and enjoy it, and return to pay me afterward. I took a chance that she would. She could have walked out, but she didn’t. She came back and paid and we talked some more, and the musician came out and she introduced us, and he was obviously pleased that she had come to see him. Total win. Will she come next year? Probably not. But he might. And you never know how things will play out. The connections we make with people play out in endlessly fascinating ways. Maybe all that happened was that I helped two people feel happier. I call that a good day.

And indeed, things did indeed make more sense by the end f the evening. Earlier chaos was resolved, things are much better prepared and organized for the morning. Which means fewer logistics to manage and more of what I really enjoy. Talking with people.

If you’re local, come and see me at ConTemporal! I’ll probably be hanging out at reg. That’s where the party is :)

Time writing:
~20 minutes
 
 
June word count:
17,064

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