The Challenge of Being a Good Volunteer

Volunteers are the lifeblood of events

Without volunteers putting in uncounted hours, whether in real life or in Second Life, special events can not happen.

I stopped volunteering years ago for conventions and more when I moved out of the area a lot of conventions were easy to get to and didn’t require a ferry or plan to get there. I was told once by someone that the reason why I was asked to be a part of a convention committee was because I was dependable, loyal, and knew what to do in a crisis before having to bring in the convention committee. The convention didn’t happen due to financial funding and that the charity the rest of concom had picked was impossible to work with. They required months to decide if they would allow us to do every single little thing and that was unfeasible for the concom.

All of that was years and years ago. A lot of it was a blur of long sleepless nights and a lot of stories I could tell of those adventures.

I will tell you two stories of volunteering at them here.

Real Life Lessons Learned

What I loved doing at big conventions was gofering. “Go fetch this. Go fetch that. Go fer X.” I also loved to sit at the emergency exit door in the art exhibit to protect the valuable art from the artists. I don’t know how many conventions I volunteered at while I was able to get to them, but once there, you couldn’t stop me.

Picture this, it was a giant convention, thousands of people are there. You paid your ticket and you want to go to all the panels and see the art and play in the game room and and and and… Basically you want to go and have fun and that plan fails upon arrival at the convention. By a semi fortuitous chance, someone from the convention committee volunteer division recognizes you and asks if you want to help out. They offer free food in compensation – mostly platters of meat, cheese and vegetables. Hey, you’re broke. Not having to feed yourself means that you have that much more money to spend in the dealers room, so you say yes even though it pains you that what you wanted to do isn’t going to be possible anymore.

Why do they always schedule all the panels you want to take all at the same time?

During a break, you decide to go to the venue’s cafeteria. There, you meet one of the guests of honour, and you start talking, not realizing that she is the guest of honour. You’re young and agile. She’s not so much, so you offer, without thinking about it, to carry her trays. She then, much to your protestations, refuse to allow her to pay for your meal. Oh, no, she insists, it’s the least she can do for you. You take her, and a second guest to the same table, the daughter of a famous author you have heard about, managing three trays of food – your own and both of theirs. The guest of honour realizes she left her cane behind and got in a tizzy, so you go and run and look around the entire line at the cafeteria and find it and bring it back, much to a much relieve guest of honour. You help her get to her room area and say goodbye, telling her it was the pleasure of her company that you enjoyed and you thanked her for the food she paid for.

Days later, during the call to closing ceremonies, you and several others are asked to go to all the rooms where guests are staying and let them know that the closing ceremonies were happening and if they needed any help getting to the big auditorium you were at. Lo, and behold, the last door you knock on is the guest who paid for your meal. She pulls you in and you then spend the next hour being told how she was harassed and stalked by rabid fans and was not protected and where was security to help her and how dare they do this to her!

She refused to go to the closing ceremony, and you tell her that you will let the convention committee know that she won’t be attending. Unfortunately, you have to leave her because you were going to be part of the volunteer acknowledgement – the ones that stepped up and volunteered when they showed up, as well as the convention committee and the local groups.

And, because you had the guest’s needs put first, you miss the volunteer appreciation.

Two months later, you get a card in the mail, along with the fanzine they edit. “Thank you for all your help, MZB.”

Yah, Marion Zimmer Bradley got freaked out at the convention I was at by some unruly general guests and she disappeared into her room. The memories I have are more than 30 years old and she’s now long gone. Why was she freaked out? Because she did not have someone as a handler to help her with everything she needed. She was abandoned, alone, and was left to fend for herself in a strange city in a strange country and that was too much for her.

The other story I have to tell you is in general. I asked my husband what happened with his father at science fiction events. Yes, there was always at least one crew member with his father at all times for anything his father needed. There was always someone there as a point of contact to let him know where he should be, where he could get food, where he could go do things. and when. If there was something his father needed, it was done.

That’s not how Stage Crew at SLB runs.

In the simplest terms, it’s a meat grinder with how they get the performers up to the stage.

Second Life – where mistakes happen at the speed of bandwidth

At the top of the hour, assignments are assigned. The person assigned as back of house starts to work, while the rest are waiting for them to do their job. The artist is contacted, brought to the test area, run the gauntlet of tests of the stream and are told that the next person will take them to the stage and then the back of house contacts the group. At this point, an infodump is made, and the person doing host work starts to work on the spam for the top of the hour. The front of house contacts the artist, and they are brought down to the back of stage, or the side of the stage, or the other stage if it’s a two stage venue. A conference chat between the active artist and the next artist is made, and the front of house coordinates between the two for the handover and once done, drops both of them and essentially abandons them.

To me, this is wrong on many accounts.

It is wrong to abandon someone and say “someone else will be next” whether or not you give the artist the name of that person.

It is wrong to not be able to keep talking to an artist once you make contact or they make contact with you. You might be the only person they talk to the entire time they are preparing for the stage, even hours before hand. Why would you have contact with them hours before they are supposed to be on stage? A multitude of factors – friendship, contact from a previous stage setting, and because they see you are a part of stage crew in the giant performers’ group chat, as well as a myriad of other reasons. Sometimes, you are their only cheerleader there because their friends couldn’t make it. They deserve one person on their side.

I had several very interesting artists this week. Three really. I’ll tell you about the first two.

Artist Number One

Number One,: a spoken word artist who was promised that he could use local voice for his performance and not his stream, even though the stream would be playing music for him. The back of house missed that, and although voice had been left on when I got there, it was turned off shortly after. He was rightly livid because he was promised one thing and, in his words, screwed him over for the third year in a row. As his front of house, I got him re-sound checked within minutes and he was good to go.

It was not a fun thing to do, nor was it something I hope to experience again. The pure anger I felt in his words, spoken and written, was hitting me hard.

The fall out for that was that somehow I got the blame for putting voice on in the sim. I wasn’t even in the sim when it was turned on in the first place! I dug through my chat logs and pulled out proof that voice was on before I got there, so someone forgot to turn it back off!

The next day, he was performing again at another stage. I had spent all day talking and calming him down and encouraging him. I explained to him how he worked. I am sure I opened his eyes when he realized that it wasn’t just me there trying to help him, but at least three other people just in the stage crew, never mind the three or four levels up the chain, all trying to make sure he could perform. The chain is the important part. Any one of them, all the way up to Patch Linden, or even Oberon, could have pulled him.

Personally, I didn’t like what that artist said in his performance or how he said it, other than the smooth cadence of his voice. The fact that the words out of his mouth are something that I don’t like is my issue, not his, even though I learned something listening to him. His first performance and handling him left me shattered, and with no time to recover, I was on to my next shift and left shaking like a leaf.

However, my not liking something doesn’t mean I won’t support anyone’s right to say it so long as I am acting in a professional capacity. So, since I had been the one he was talking with, I had warned the next stage manager that had him about him and I told her I would be glad to take him through back of house and get him set up there so that their crew didn’t have to. I should have also recommended that one of the people I had been mentoring should have been his front of house.

Yes, my first year as a part of Second Life’s stage crew, and I’m mentoring people by the third day. Go me!

Anyway, there was another issue, but he treated the front of house a lot better than he had treated me originally. He did his set, the next performer was a no-show, so instead of one hour, he got two, even though another artist was found, had replied in three different spots, and had gotten to the test area to be tested. The stage manager had been so frazzled that they misunderstood what the artist had said.

Yah, I missed getting my chance to perform again. So, I sat there, and played a couple of songs for my mentees to keep them going, and then went back to what I was doing with the crew I was in.

Anyway, back to where I was going…

Artist Number 2

Artist Number 2 was found hours before he was supposed to set up in the audience of the stage he was going to be at. I said hi to him, and he said hi back and wanted to know where he could set up three hours before he was supposed to. Yikes! So, I took charge of him and kept in contact with the stage crew, and talked to him.

I kept talking to him. I kept encouraging him. I kept on answering his questions. I kept it up until just before he was supposed to be called to the test area, and I was letting the stage manager know what I was doing, on top of everything else I was doing. At the start of his test hour, the stage manager gave the order. “Since you’ve been the one to keep him off our backs,” they were referring to two different stage managers at the time since it was their shift change, “you get to test him.”

So I did. I found out that he was a non-native English speaker and was using Google translate to speak to me. I got him tested, and more and out of the test area and on to the next person.

I was not amused when I found out that his tribute to a specific big band meant lots of flashing lights, lasers, and strobes. There’s a reason why I like being back of house. If I hadn’t gotten into his inbox in the first place, he might have dropped something down hours before he would have been allowed to.

Anyway… nearer the end of my shift that day, I got in grief for keeping my inbox with the artists open. I am NOT going to abandon an artist. I leave it open as a point of contact for the artist as they perform so that they can do what they do and know that there is someone there in case they need anything cause shit can hit the fan.

I’m sorry not sorry for doing this. I know what it is like from the performer’s side of things. You are in a strange location, there are potentially hundreds of people listening to you, and if you have your own host, they can’t be with you where you are while this strange person says stuff to you and gets you to marionette for them. Stream. Host. Microphone check. Costume check – make sure females have panties on and men don’t have their … stuff on.

Then you get handed off to another person. Who is this person? Why are they talking to me? What’s going on? Oh. Okay. Stand here. Wait. wait. wait. Heart racing. Adrenaline. Second thoughts. Worse. Is my playlist going to get me banned?

My point is that abandoning the artists who volunteer their time to perform for Second Life is bad. If it’s bad in real life, it’s even worse so in Second Life. They are often anxious. Some are scared. A few are even outright terrified: what if what I do screw up?

Trust me, I have been there.

The Third Artist

There is a third artist I want to speak about. He got in my inbox and told me to stop being so good at what I do and to only work with this specific stage manager. It wasn’t what he said. It was the way he said it. That I was only supposed to work with this one stage manager, and stop being me. I’m good, cause I follow my instinct more than anything else and the one rule I know to follow: make sure the artist has whatever they need to perform be it encouragement, knowing you are there, or even telling them afterwards it was a good job that they did. What that artist did, with what the first artist above did, since the two events happened right after another, didn’t just rattle me. It destroyed my enjoyment of the guard’s set. I was in tears.

He ruined my joy in seeing a friend perform, something I had been looking forward to ever since I found out that they had gotten in.

I wanted to quit stage crew right then and there. He did this within hours of dealing with Artist Number 1, but one of the people I mentored talked to me and kept me going.

So… I have two more posts to do at the least. One about safety in stage crew and for the artists and performers we stage, and an idea on how to handle the artists and their handovers better.