inqk.net

Disclaimer: I work on SMASH! and in the past I have worked on Animania.

The people who work on Australia’s anime conventions — Ai-con, Animania, AVCon, Manifest, Wai-Con and us at SMASH! — all work really hard.

Let’s just accept that as a given. If you didn’t want to do any work, you wouldn’t put your hand up to help on these kind of things. You’d just sit and recline on one of those inflatable couches people float around in hotel pools on.

On top of that, we’re volunteers. You certainly don’t get into the convention organising business to make money. If everything goes according to plan, you’ll make just enough money to be able to run your convention again the next year. And that’s assuming you can find enough idiots to volunteer to organise it all again.

So us convention organisers are hard workers and we’re volunteers. This is true. But this doesn’t mean that we’re infallible. And it doesn’t mean we’re not lazy. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes we don’t make mistakes. We are human beings and we screw up just like everyone else. The fact we’re volunteers doesn’t somehow magically stop this from happening.

So when I see people defending convention organisers by excusing any mistakes on the basis that ‘Well, we’re all volunteers’ or ‘Well, it’s really hard to organise a convention’ I get upset.

I get upset because it’s not an excuse. The person affected by the mistake is no less affected because you are a volunteer. They might understand that you didn’t pronounce their name properly — hello me as cosplay host in 2009 — because you’re a volunteer and you had a day job and that meant you didn’t have time to practice pronounciation as many times as you’d like but you still made a mistake.

Just say you’re sorry and you made a mistake. The world will not end if you do this. In fact, the world will not care. Because you’re running an anime convention and no one is going to die if you forget something.

I want to be really clear that this does not mean convention organisers should have to put up with unreasonable demands. Someone complaining that the convention should have cost $2 rather than $20 is a moron. What I’m talking about is a person who legitimately has been affected by the convention’s mistake. And they’re, usually, asking, Hey, what happened? That is a fair question and we should answer it. And by ‘we’ I mean the person who knows the answer. If someone doesn’t know why I was tired on stage on Saturday, they shouldn’t answer it. They should go and find me and tell me to answer it.

There would be no anime conventions were it not for the tireless work of the organisers that put them on. So let’s give them a hand. But not a pass. If we screw up, we should admit it and explain our reasons. We should do that because it’s polite and we should do it because it means we’re better able to avoid repeating the mistake next time.

And that’ll make us all winners.