Editing The Pen Addict 728/transcript (section)

== No Re-Entry Tickets ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' on the certain day tickets. Yes. Which that ended up, I think that was my biggest issue. And the most comments I heard on was the no return policy for like, if you had not a VIP ticket, but you had, let's say, uh, Friday one o'clock entry. Okay. You had to go into the show and you were in. And if you left either the show or the courtyard space, you could not return. Mm-hmm. So where the issues arose with that was that actual boundary for no return was not placed, uh, efficiently or correctly. Where was it placed? So, so the retail space and the courtyard were within the boundary. But then what would happen is the spacewalk and the classes were three buildings, four buildings away. So one really good comment, one like very clear issue is one of my friends was there with their family. She was shopping in the retail with the kids. The husband went to take the class. They just had the, the regular day ticket and he could not get back in to see the family again because of where it's easily fixed where the, it's just the barrier was outside the courtyard. So he couldn't come back to the courtyard, hang out. The courtyard had lots of free activities. That's where the food and drink was. Um, I get not being allowed back into the retail space, but the courtyard

'''Myke Hurley:''' needs to be outside the boundary. Well, no, I just, I think if you're going to a class for stationary first, you should be able to come back in stationary first. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like I don't even think you're at the courtyard, but I think if you have a ticket and you leave, like you're like, I want to go eat outside. Like I don't disagree with like what you're not coming back in now. Like, and if it's made very clear, it was, it's, it's a way of trying to do something to ease the pressure on the event.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So yeah, these tickets knew in advance, there was a no re-entry ticket, but I think the confusion lied was there was actually separation of events that prevented, um, that caused some problems.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I, I would expect if you, if you mentioned that to Yoseka, they would agree with that part.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I think that's the most common, common issue besides crowds.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's like if, if we're doing it, if we're paying you more money to go to a class, you shouldn't then take my ability to, to not return to the event. But I just figure if you're leave, if you leave the boundary, you should not coming back, I think is fine. They've just got to find, maybe draw that boundary a little different.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Exactly. That's my, my take on that. Like I get the, like the retail space boundary, like you're buying a, uh, um, one-time ticket for, you know, a time slot, essentially an entry time. There was no exit time. You didn't have to leave. Um, but like, yeah, if you wanted to exit that boundary for like show, especially show related reasons, like that was, that was a weird, weird setup. Um, those were the two big, the two biggest issues were peak crowds, which I don't, you, I'm not going to say it's unsolvable, but like adding more space does not solve that. Right. Like it caught that causes as many problems as, as anything else. Um, and then the return access. I think those were the two main issues, which is smaller

'''Myke Hurley:''' issues. Reflection though. If you compare that to 24. Oh, I I'll, I'll mention something on

'''Brad Dowdy:''' that. So like what they fixed from 24 was the lines. Yeah. Uh, they couldn't get people into the event in 24 this year. It was like a highlighted, like, yes, you were in a line that wrapped around the building to enter the stationary fest, but it was efficiently

'''Myke Hurley:''' moving. Huge, huge, huge line, but constantly moving. So never heard a complaint on that doesn't feel so bad and you know, to expect it. Yep. Everyone was like, Oh yeah, we got

'''Brad Dowdy:''' in and like 15 minutes where in 2024 is like, it took two to three hours. Right. So it was, it was crazy. Yeah. Um, small little things. I thought our panel visibility could have been better. I didn't like how they oriented the tent situation. It was not great. People couldn't

'''Myke Hurley:''' find us. But that's an us thing. You know what I mean? Like, like I agree with that, but that's

'''Brad Dowdy:''' the selfish, uh, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just weird. Like that could have been like still, we might not have had as many people, but people could have at least like seen what

'''Myke Hurley:''' was going on and maybe. Cause there were people that kind of like found it by act found us by accident and sat down and watched cause they were interested, but they didn't, the people

'''Brad Dowdy:''' didn't have the opportunity. Yeah. They didn't have the opportunity. Uh, also on day one, we drank all the refill stations, the water refill stations empty, which was kind of crazy. They had three. The flip side is though that they had them. It's awesome. Like we use the heck out of them. That's all we did was drink water all day every three days. But I just, that was just kind of a small, funny anecdote is like, well, I guess, uh, it's working. It's working as intended. Right. Uh, but I've never seen that happen to where we actually drank the, the refill stations dry. Like these are like the real lines, by the way,

'''Myke Hurley:''' there, there were still lines inside for certain tables. And I think that they managed them about as well as you could want. They, they had volunteers staffing those lines and the lines that they knew were going to occur. They weren't crossing over other people's tables. They were kind of moving the people around in such a way that it wasn't like obstructing others.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Just visually speaking, I didn't realize this until like the second or third day, anywhere that they knew they had tables where they had to man extra staff to have a line to go to that table. We're all near an exit point. Yeah. So it was a good place. So they wrapped them exteriorly, you know, it doesn't have not, I'm not saying necessarily outside. One of them was definitely outside, but anytime every table that had a line was set in an area in the building to where the line could move out of the way, it still doesn't prevent crowding, but it prevents the line from wrapping and getting in front of other tables to your point. But I just wanted to make that point. They stage those exactly where they needed to be because they can move some of the crowd, like, you know, 10 feet away, right outside of a door and then manage, then actively manage that

'''Myke Hurley:''' with their staff. And then something that I noticed is that some of the people where lines were forming on day one, kind of like unexpectedly, I guess, they moved those people to a different area for the second and third days to try and alleviate some of that, which I thought was very clever.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. They were very active in managing as much as they could. Also never seen so much security in my life. Yeah. Security everywhere. Yeah. As well as the volunteers. Security and volunteers were literally everywhere. Like you couldn't turn around with seeing one. Which again, just made the whole

'''Myke Hurley:''' thing have that feeling of like, we're protected here in a way. Yeah, it was good. It was very,

'''Brad Dowdy:''' yeah, it was very good. So that's kind of like the, like the highlights of like the space and the events and like the, the more overall stuff. Obviously, if you have any more feedback, you can send it to me. Hello at penact.com. They're definitely like, we're not saying anything that

'''Myke Hurley:''' they don't already know, but I'm sure there's people at Yoseka about it before we even left.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. And we are admittedly, our experience was not the same as everyone's because we had like kind of like VIP access. We had the brutality treatment.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So like definitely they are, they need to know and are willing to listen to any issues you had and try to correct them if there's going to be a next time. We were both assuming there's going to be a next time by how they were talking. So yeah, like what they changed from 2024 to 2026 was noticeable and it worked. So there's still tweaking to do and you got to let

'''Myke Hurley:''' them know. Yep. Just before we move on from this, I wanted to mention real quick. So Marybeth did a