Those of you who know me know that I love Arisia; I've been attending for 21 years; volunteering for 20, and some level of Staff for 19.
This year at Arisia, I tried to be useful. I failed.
Arisia is gifted with having the volunteer services of several very competent individuals. However, some of these individuals have a compulsive need to micromanage anything that comes within reach and then try to overextend their reach into other spheres. Furthermore, there is a small, self-selected clique of people who behave as if Arisia is their private playground, to operate for their own pleasure.
Specifically, this year, the Arisia ’13 Operations Division Head treated me in an unacceptable fashion by harassment and misuse of official authority granted to him for professional use by using that position of authority against me to achieve a personal end. In this, he received aid and assistance from the Convention Chair and her Convention Committee by either a lack of corrective action or by actions taken specifically to collude with his goals or by covering up the effects of his actions.
This is going to prove detrimental to the organization overall.
Setting the Scene
There were a lot of issues with the truck load from Arisia Storage this year. I had crew at Storage at 1400h on Wednesday to load a truck; the schedule, if it had worked properly, would have had the truck arriving at 1600h. There were weather delays – that’s normal. What wasn’t normal was finding an SUV parked half-in and half-out of the loading dock space and the adjoining not-exactly parking space. This caused a significant delay when we decided to go rent the 2nd truck (the Concourse Side truck) and load it first.
Now, lots of folk know that I like a good plan, and following that plan. I’m also trying to learn to be more flexible. So when the Logistics Department Head asked me to load the Concourse side truck first, I agreed. This was a problem: I knew exactly what needed to go on the Galleria truck, and in what order – the original plan was to load the Galleria Truck first, then I could go upstairs and see what was left to know how to arrange it for loading the Concourse side truck. This was important to me, personally as a truck loadmaster, because most of the gear destined for the Concourse side of the Hotel is mostly Ballroom Tech Gear – this gear comes in cases that are not conducive to stacking. Also, it would mean that by loading the Galleria truck first, there would have been A LOT of healthy, awake crew to move a freezer full of frozen food – as we will see later, a key plot point.
The amount of stuff borrowed from NESFA far exceeded what I was told we were borrowing; this affected how I packed the trucks. First, I had to fit a lot more gear than I expected into the Concourse Truck; this required me to stop work upstairs in storage while we ported the gear bound for the Concourse side from one truck to another. Then, when it came time to load the Galleria side truck, the entire truck bed was littered with various gear; this required a significant period of time to pre-Tetris so that we could load the Art Show Peg Carts, Art Show totes & gear, Art Show Pipe Carts, totes & boxes, Art Show Road Cases, totes and boxes, then stage the refrigerators and all the other gear.
The delays were enormous. Had we followed The Plan, we would have ended at least 2 hours earlier than we did. As it was, we finished the truck loading and left Storage for the Hotel for the Galleria Side Truck at 0330h Thursday morning – there goes me showing up at 0900h to unload the truck early and then start staging for Art Show Setup.
The Problem
RKOV gives the impression that he wants to do EVERYTHING himself – he thinks nothing of telling me how to load the truck, bossing crew around, and generally being a nuisance.
I think RKOV needs to understand that as the Operations Division Head, he is neither a laborer nor a supervisor; he is a manager. His job is to get resources to his department heads and get results from them. If he likes loading gear to boot, that’s fine – we need volunteers – but when he decides he wants to move heavy gear, he is no longer a manager, but a worker to be supervised. That means he needs to subordinate himself to the Logistics Department Head and does what Logistics Department Head tells him to do. And if the Logistics Department Head tells him that Merv has been hired on specifically to be responsible for loading the truck just-so at Storage, then he should listen to the Logistics Department Head, else he should get the heck out of the way and go get the sleep he so obviously required.
He shouldn’t then go on to abuse his authority for revenge.
Near the end of the load, very late at night (very early the next morning?), RKOV and I tried to get a huge, heavy speaker for the Films room down from a tall tower stack. It wouldn’t slide; it was pivoting on a high point of the box below it. I finally got frustrated with the lack of progress, stepped down from the ladder, and lifted the box – from a point over my head – and gently set it down on the ground. Where this item would make a full elevator load, and where the last thing to move after that was a freezer full of food, I announced that I was going back downstairs to stage the truck and load the elevator-load of gear into the truck. I then left the room.
RKOV, for reasons best understood by himself, decided to try to put the freezer – full of frozen food – on a two-wheel dolly by himself. There were people present in the room when he tried this; those witnesses told me that he was advised not to do this, and help was offered to him. He refused. He suffered a catastrophic failure; the freezer fell on him, injuring his foot. And this is all my fault, because I wasn’t in the room to help him move the freezer.
This is BS. We had a full elevator load. The elevator load of gear needed to be loaded into the truck, leaving room for the freezer. The freezer was a multi-person job; the freezer needed to be balanced carefully on the elevator trip down, and especially on the lift gate of the truck. I don’t know why RKOV decided to try this on his own – it has been suggested that, after witnessing my feat of lifting the films speaker off the tower alone, that he needed to demonstrate a similar feat – but HE chose to do it. His decision. Yet he blamed me for it.
The Double Standard
Which leads me to discuss the double standard in Arisia. The popular, in crowd runs things – they can do no wrong. People they don’t like get the shaft. Everything the people they don’t like do is wrong as a result of nefarious reasons.
I tend to get sarcastic and snarky when concerns I raise get brushed aside – such as when I send an email seeking information; and 1) the reply consists of non-useful fluff, 2) when I get the run-around (the Galleria Manager says, ‘you need to talk to the Hotel Liaison for that,’ and the Hotel Liaison says, ‘that’s an issue for the Galleria Manager’), or 3) simply ignored.
Apparently, I touched some nerves this year with my sarcasm. I was told both that
“Your e-mail was incredibly rude, you're often incredibly belligerent, rude, and adversarial and maybe, just maybe, if you gave people the benefit of the doubt, and didn't include all of the other possibly personal nonsense, maybe you'd get more done,”and
“I've received several reports, formal and informal, over the last several months, of your increasingly hostile conduct to your fellow Arisia staffers, who like you volunteer their time to a labor of love. After consulting with the Assistant Conchairs to ensure this was an objective decision, I am writing to inform you that your conduct is unacceptable and cannot continue. If your hostile conduct does continue, it will result in your being immediately removed from A13 staff, mailing lists, and committee meetings.”Others send snarky, sarcastic messages to the entire staff list, and they’re considered funny:
“I believe the above email was intended humorously, and I certainly though [sic] it was myself.”Later, I was told
“While you are welcome to ask clarifying questions on this matter, I must point out that you have made people uncomfortable in the past by giving the impression that you are trying to find out exactly how much you can "get away" with, and so I encourage you to tread lightly,”which is such a thinly veiled threat that even I can read between the lines and get it (which is significant, given my inability to read between the lines of casual, colloquial speech).
Now, let’s take some excerpts from the Arisia 2013 Souvenir Book, “Arisia 2013 Policies and Procedures,” sometimes known as the “Code of Conduct”:
“The general principles of this Code of Conduct apply to the Arisia convention and also to all the activities of the convention committee,”
“Arisia expects its members to respect each other and behave in a generally civilized fashion. Members should respect common sense rules for public behavior, personal interaction, common courtesy and respect for private property . . . Additionally, all Staff are representatives of Arisia and therefore are held to a higher standard of behavior, even when off duty.”
“Arisia forbids abusive, insulting, harassing or intimidating behavior. Please report any incidents in which a member of the convention is abusive, insulting, intimidating bothersome or acting in an unsafe or illegal manner to Convention Security, an Assistant Div [sic] Head, a Division Head, an Assistant Con Chair, or the Con Chair.”RKOV gets upset at me because I can’t read his mind during the Wednesday Night Truck Load and hurts himself – then blames me for it, ‘cause I wasn’t even in the room at the time.
That’s right, I wasn’t around when he made his decision to attempt something out of his ability, and as a result, it’s all my fault.
Listen, folks, I know I’m born a Murphy, and I’ve got that law working against me and all, but seriously, I’ve got a 7’6” radius of effect – by being out of the room, down the hall, at the bottom of the elevator, and out by the truck, I was far enough away that there is no way to legitimately blame me for this ill-made decision.
Did that stop RKOV from ripping me a new bodily opening in the Volunteer Lounge, in front of witnesses, threatening to have me fired before the end of the convention because I did this to him?
Nope.
This year, RKOV melts down on me, threatens – in front of witnesses – to have me fired for something I didn’t do. I filed an Incident Report for Harassment with Security immediately.
No one in the concom reached out to me during the weekend. RKOV was left in charge of the Operations Division.
At the end of the con, during Load-Out, RKOV then sent a pair of volunteers, to whom I’ll refer as “M & M,” down to relieve me of loading & driving the Galleria Side Logistics Truck, the job the Logistics Department Head had specifically hired me on to accomplish.
When I finally mention (nearly two weeks after the convention) how distressed I am that no action was taken at the convention, and that RKOV was left in a position of power to abuse his authority, the reply I got from the senior co-Division Head of Staff Services (who is the same person who was the 2012 and is 2013 Readercon Chairperson, and thus someone whom I would expect would be right on top of handling any allegation of harassment) was:
“It is possible to be responsive, and yet not do so with the speed desired. I believe that is happening here. We have decided that we need a process by which to address staff interpersonal challenges before we apply said process to anyone's specific concerns or situations.”“We” decided? Just who is “we” – especially since I don’t appear to be part of “we.” In any event, was a process needed when I was dealt with for my sarcastic remarks through email?
Nope.
Which, to my point of view, means that a process is not needed to prevent a senior member of convention leadership from abusing his authority for his own pleasure.
Double Standard.
RKOV gets to abuse his authority for the sake of personal animus; no consequence of substance has been realized. I snark at someone – who has been known to be snarky in her own right – and I get told I’m hostile and about to be fired.
The difference is that the people who are behaving in an abusive fashion towards me are popular and very high up division heads – they have all of the power; I’m just a pain in the anatomy who asks too many questions and expects the courtesy of an answer – even if that answer is merely “I can’t answer this right now, check back in a week,” or “I don’t know” or “sure, you can plug that box into any outlet.”
Conclusions
I have all of the emails to support the quotes I used in this document. Because many of these are private email correspondence, I hesitate to simply post them all on the open ‘Net. However, the concerned reader should realize that I can support my position, and if necessary, I will.
I’m pissed that all of these decisions are being made behind closed doors, without any dialogue with me.
I’m pissed that certain individuals can do whatever they want, however inappropriate, with impunity, because of their popularity. I’m pissed that my harassment complaint was buried – while it certainly wasn’t sexual in nature, it did involve an abuse of power – but the people involved certainly showed that the concept of the second-class citizen exists in Arisia, and that I’m one of ‘em.
If the intentions of the popular, ruling clique in Arisia are to drive me out of the organization, they failed – someone needs to stick around and speak for the best interest of the Corporation, the Corporate Membership, and the activities and functions sponsored by the Corporation.
There are five people in Arisia right now, who appear (in my opinion) to think they are the be-all and end-all of Arisia Convention Management. I think that if these three men and two women really think they’re all that, and that Arisia can’t run without them, then they should go away, start their own convention, and see how well it goes – and see if Arisia collapses without them.
Until then, these people have an obligation to treat people in Arisia fairly and correctly. In that, they failed at Arisia 2013.
