[Pic credit: dpn]
A new pair of trucks was rented, and Dan spent almost an hour Monday morning just cracking them loose enough to get doors open and windows cleared off. A blowtorch may have helped here and there...
Monday
| The weather had turned ugly over the weekend, with a few inches of soggy snow dropped -- followed by a flash freeze that entombed everything in a hard crust and would stay that way for another couple of days under single-digit temps. It was an unusually fast transition -- anybody who hadn't cleared what they cared about early enough was simply hosed. Not the most favorable conditions under which to start the next phase of our adventure -- similar strike and loadout as in the past, but everything headed for a new place! Now we'd get a solid sense of movement and timing as far as getting our stuff up to Haverhill. |
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[Pic credit: dpn] |
And we already knew what to call this participatory show -- Logistics On Ice!
A new pair of trucks was rented, and Dan spent almost an hour Monday morning just cracking them loose enough to get doors open and windows cleared off. A blowtorch may have helped here and there... |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
| With the elevators at old Storage functional again, the first task was to go recover some of our wheels -- the now-empty shelf sets and gear wagons that the hand-carried stuff deployed all over the convention needed to pack into. When Dan and Mark arrived there, they found that the landlord hadn't done *any* clearing, and they had to muscle the transport stuff out across the ice-pack. Eventually they got it to the hotel and sent around to the relevant areas. | |
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Meanwhile, it was rip-tear-n-roll time in the ballroom as usual. I got all my personal stuff packed and ready to go, and had already given up on any notion to try and fetch my car into town and load into that. I would simply send my gear up to Haverhill and get it later, since I'd be on the second phase of Storage-move the next weekend anyway. The rest of the pack-down was slow going and seemed to be rather disorganized and lacking an evident inventory to check things against, and some stuff was still supporting functions elsewhere in the hotel, so it was time for me to leave others to that and swap back into Logistics mode. |
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We had one truck about half full by then, but decided to take it and some
extra crew north anyway while it was still within business hours.
This was partially to get more people, myself included, run through the
little training/intro on the freight elevator that the Haverhill management
wants everyone using it to have.
I also hadn't seen the space since our site tour, so I had no idea
yet how things would begin getting organized into it.
It took just about an hour from downtown Boston up to the new Storage site, and the building manager was still there. She's there a lot, and only lives 5 minutes away if there's a problem. |
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We're used to balky freight elevators, so one with actual floor
call buttons is a luxury for us.
The doors and inner safety cage are still manual, and one nice feature is
buttons to "inch" up or down a little and manually trim floor leveling.
That works with the cage slightly open -- in fact, the cage *has* to be raised
a little first for the buttons to work, so you can see what you're doing.
Leaving just a little step *down* in the intended direction of item
travel is okay, having a bump *up* is wrong.
In general, one does not have to be quite as Somerville-grade rough with
this elevator to make it work.
There's even a skylight at the top of the shaft, letting a little daylight filter down and lend some sense of the time. |
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The random desks had been cleared out and the floor swept up, and the room was a big, glorious blank slate! Lisa had taped up signs marking tentative slots for departmental items; now we'd see how well that would survive the onslaught of reality. |
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And the pipe cart, our longest item, *just* fits in the elevator!
Phi had measured for this and expressed reasonable confidence, but it's
still very very close -- the inner cages clear the corners by less than
an inch at either end.
It didn't take long to finish up here, and Dan and I headed back into town while others stayed up in Haverhill for a dinner break. I wanted to hook through old Storage to pick up even more empty wheeled items, because a couple of our lighting wagons had been missing at strike and any more usable wheels we could dig up would help general load-out. |
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There was one rather terrifying moment on the way back.
Dan was driving, just coming off 93 on the Mystic Ave exit, and did
a very slight lurch on the brakes as we were coming down to the light.
Suddenly, an incredibly loud noise like a fusillade of cannons started,
and kept going -- while we watched a cascade of big ice chunks come down
past the windshield and scatter into the road.
They were sliding off the front of the box, hammering onto the metal roof
right above our heads, and then onto the hood.
The stuff was heavy enough that it actually swung the rearview mirror
bracket forward.
Both of us realized what was going on after the initial startle, in about
the same time it took to start thinking "holy F...?" and see the
first chunks come past the windshield, and then all we could do is sit there
and wait for it to eventually end and hope nothing actually got broken.
Technically anyone driving a truck *is* responsible for clearing snow and ice off the top of it, but everything was so hard-frozen there wasn't really any way we could. We also didn't think the box could have possibly warmed up enough in the day's brutal cold to let the ice slide off at all, but evidently all our activity had. | |
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There was still plenty of stuff at old Storage, most of which would be transported the next weekend. We pulled another couple of empty roadcases out and headed back the hotel. Meanwhile, the other truck had been loaded and was just about ready to head out. The ballroom was clear of our stuff, since we lost it at 8pm, and PSAV was already in there building the next event. The 4Wall order had eventually gotten successfully re-packed and picked up. We wolfed down a little food at the Dead Dog, did some fiddling to swap trucks at the dock, and then headed north again with the next load for Haverhill -- a nice full truck this time, and an extra helper riding along to assist at the other end. |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
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Given the larger staging areas at the dock and the storage floor in
Haverhill, an optimal workflow makes itself fairly evident.
Teams of two or three at each end stage up stuff for the elevator or
take what emerges from it, and one person just stays in the elevator
to load/unload it and run it up and down.
For a while I was Elevator Monkey, in which I'd take things in from the
dock, whisk them upstairs and push them into the hall, and go right
back down.
Next time I came back up, the hall was clear again.
When elevators work smoothly and you have room to buffer, it's very
efficient.
And even though it's 6 floors, this 'vator is faster than the one at
old Storage, so the transit time is about the same.
Another nice feature of the layout is that it's easier to move pallets around, so more things might wind up getting palletized for shipment in future events. After all of this load was delivered upstairs, it still looked like there was a lot of space left! [Here we also see a marked difference in on-device processing between an iphone (left) and a "real camera" (right). The iphone output looks "crisper", but only because it, like almost all other phone cameras, punches the contrast and saturation, and applies a slightly surreal level of over-sharpening that puts halos around a lot of the light/dark transitions. It's not as bad on iphones as on some other types, but still there. My camera delivers a more muted but balanced image with clean lines, more closely matching what we physically see, and in this case perhaps a little more dull because of dust from my clothing that I kept forgetting to wipe off the lens. Sure, I could have tried to match these better in post, but why bother.] | |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
| Lisa's marking of per-department areas looked awfully tight, since a stud-bay's width wasn't exactly going to hold much, but she'd done it in a bit of a hurry as an initial concept. What she got really right, though, was grouping like-kind areas -- such as kids, teens, fast-track together; ops/watch/first-aid and related areas in another batch, etc. Thus, the specific placement could be fiddled back and forth and still make overall sense. Artshow was at one end, and we stacked all that in pretty tight but with the expectation that it might expand a bit and sometimes take over the opposite corner during work-parties. Same with Tech and video down at the other end, which would need space to spread out and work on gear. | |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
We finally got back into town well after midnight, and meanwhile the other truck had gotten loaded mostly with stuff bound for NESFA. Both trucks were taken over to the still-icy Ryder yard in Southie for the overnight. Because of the perpetual mystery of where to park trucks in Boston, I had suggested asking the rental office about this, and they were fine with it. They've actually got quite a large yard, right down D street from the Westin and not too far from the PPH. |
Tuesday
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A bunch of stuff had been hastily stored down in the Terrace room, and
some food functions were still deployed up in various guest rooms.
The food-room folks were responsible for packing things up and putting
them back on shelf sets to get ready for transit, but were lagging on
this in spots.
We spent a while in the morning bringing more wheels upstairs and helping
them pack and move, and eventually the flow downward and outward started
up again once a truck appeared outside.
The routing down from guest-floors to basement was a bit klunky: since all the service areas on the guest floors were locked off with magnetic door-holders, I had to take stuff down the passenger elevator as far as 4 or Mezz, roll around into the service area [whose door was open], and thence to the basement and onward through the catacombs. As someone noted later at Debrief, it would be handy for some staff to be given working key-cards to the service column so we could take the more direct path. Or just keep the doors unlocked on the relevant floors. |
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| Most of our stuff had to come past here in the basement, to get to the working freight elevator up to the dock. It is next to the one that was out of service, and Tuesday morning the elevator company was there working on the improvements. The person peering into the pit is our convention chair, who'd come down to assist his minions with load-out ... | |
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... and this was certainly his week to be weighed in the balance! This elegant old freight scale along a basement corridor still works, and can measure up to a thousand pounds. Unfortunately I don't think anyone thought to try parking any of our heaviest items here on the way by and get an idea of their real weight. |
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I spent some time moving stuff from Terrace up to outside and some time
in the truck, sort of back and forth, as did others on our crew.
The hotel staff was in its normal daytime movements around the deep bowels
of the building too, and I think we demonstrated to many of them
that it's completely possible to confidently do this type of heavy work
without shoes.
They saw us concentrating on our tasks and being organized while keeping out
of their way as much as we could, and they always seem to appreciate that
regardless of what's on anyone's feet or not.
The day had turned slightly warmer and the sunlight was helping, but the ice blob on the back of the truck still refused to melt or chip off the rest of the way. And at some point a crate from Cosplay Repair or some similarly-equipped department had dropped and spewed some contents all over the floor; I kept finding lots of little safety pins, chunks of some wagon casters that were coming apart as they rolled, and other detritus. So I was walking over all that and the salty/gravelly ice on the tail, and was just fine on all of it. When it came time to flip the liftgate and button things up, I left some amusing wet prints on it while securing the door. | |
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Then it was back on the road to Haverhill, yet again. While fairly nice and new, this rental was distinctly underpowered; here, two larger trucks tore past us simultaneously on both sides. Eep! |
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[Pic credit: sjs] |
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Dan had driven the leg up but then suggested that I do this back-in at
Haverhill, just to get used to how it looks, especially starting from the
"harder" direction facing west which is a tighter turn.
We'd landed that way for a good reason -- with a truck labeled 13'6 high
we didn't want to chance a bridge signed 13'4, even if I had measured no
less than 13'8 in my explorations, so we exited at the Ward Hill connector
and came up 125 into town from the south to reach Essex St.
Beyond the windshield we see the wall of the train station and abutment
of the bridge in question.
First thing was to figure out the funny little paddle shifter on
this Freightie, which was another
Ultrashift setup
and a little
squirrely to drift smoothly, due to the automated clutch drag.
The backing turn isn't so tough but it pays to take another wiggle once
safely in off the street, to get lined up closely parallel to the building
on the left side.
The idea is to come in nice and straight and *just* off the stairway.
What's utterly lovely is that there's plenty of room to line up for
all this, without blocking traffic.
Dan also noted that trucks with an air-suspension dump can usefully bring the bed down much closer to the 44" dock level, making for a flatter roll. | |
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Another nice discovery: two of the rolling Metro shelves exactly fit end to end, meaning you could cram four of them in at once and still have room for an operator to walk back and forth. Since more and more of our stuff stores and ships on these, that's useful. |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
| It was a pretty mixed bag of stuff in this load, as it was the last of the Storage-bound stuff scattered around the hotel. One thing I can never quite figure out is why we always have so much soda left over. And with all the secrecy and opaque shrink-wrap involved in slipping it *into* the hotel, nobody seemed to give a crap about it on the way out. Sure, one compensatory idea is that a lot of it gets saved for Boskone, but buying less in the first place would have saved a few bucks and, we'll also note, eased the load on the Bucket Brigade which had to disassemble and rebuild an entire pallet of these bottles in the process of passing them down. Not to mention just how *bad* most of that crap is for anyone's health. | |
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Now things were looking a little more filled up, but still plenty of floor space left. |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
The tech end of things was a little more of a mess, because all the gear was kept away from the studwall pending assembly of all the black shelves along it. That would happen the next weekend. I also kept my personal stuff separated out, so I could take it home later. |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
The truck was just about empty and the con was really over; time to start
heading home.
Our luggage would ride south in the nose, as far as where my car was.
I drove the leg down to the Wal-Mart, playing with the Ultrashift's manual mode a bit on the local roads. I also took the opportunity to come down 125 instead of 93 and show Dan the "warp tunnel" part of that road, where there's basically nothing but woods all the way through. |
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The car was all iced in like everything else, but it turned out that the wind had blown a lot of the snow off during the freeze-up process, making sort of a funny hat on the lee side. It all slid off fairly easily in big chunks. |
[Pic credit: dpn] |
The more significant problem was that the 12V battery was down to about
2 volts, i.e. completely dead and not even able to unlock the doors.
Well, even if it was a Yellowtop, it was over ten years old and had just
been sitting through five days and a couple of single-digit nights, so
not really a surprise.
It was time to do the dance of open with mechanical key, crawl into the
back to manually pop the hatch, dig out the "booster box" which is a small
UPS with a generic [and fairly new] 8Ah "brick" inside, and plug it into
the connector that I've got right there ready for it.
That was enough to boot the car, after which the hybrid battery took over
to fire up the engine and get things recharging.
After some minimal shoveling I was able to bull my way out of the little
snowbank.
A new Yellowtop was ordered a few days later... |
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An even larger problem was the solid ice plow-ridge across the driveway
upon arriving home.
Snow shovels would be 100% useless on this.
All we wanted to do by then was get inside and collapse, but first came
possibly the most grueling crowbar work I've ever had to do out here --
that's about the only way to deal with this, ram a steel wrecking bar
endwise in under this stuff, and then yank up hard to break out chunks
to then throw aside.
Hulk smash!
We carved out a notch just big enough for the car and a token path up
to the door, backed in and shut down, and the rest was, well, *rest*.
[For some reason, perhaps the biting cold, the camera refused to autofocus on this particular shot no matter what I tried.] |