Arisia 2019, part 5

  Storage move part 2

There were two general options for moving from one storage facility to another -- piggyback on the existing transport capability of holding the convention itself, or try and find sufficient labor bandwidth for a completely different timeframe outside of that.  Integrating with running the con seemed like the far more sensible route, but krikey, did it *have* to come in this particular year when so much of our infrastructure, both human and mechanical, fell apart??  Either way, we still had enough stuff that did *not* go to con year to year that an additional chunk of time and transport was still necessary. But some of those same volunteers that step up for the conventions were also willing to commit to this next phase of effort, especially after the big boost in community spirit everyone had gotten from how we overcame so many crazy obstacles already.  After a few days of recovery, some of us were ready to go at another round of this stuff, and it had been decided to spread that activity out over the entire friday/saturday/sunday span of the weekend.

So everything had to go this time, and we weren't yet sure how many truckloads it would wind up being.  One of the first steps was to clear everything off the storage shelves where some of it had been sitting for years, and then knock the shelves themselves apart.  These are nice heavy-duty sets, I think from Edsal, and available on Amazon.  Very light self-weight but quite strong, with almost zero wobble once the angled part connections seat themselves.  I had been suggesting to buy a few more of these for a couple of years, with the idea of integrating them into a different layout plan for the old Storage.  That was all moot now, but having plenty of shelves set up for optimal ALC storage can't hurt.

Heavy stuff again went into the nose of the truck, including a bunch of art-show components newly acquired from the Lunacon folks.  Stacked steel pipe and peg-board are some of the most weight-dense stuff we have to deal with, and the "gridwall" that signage kiosks get constructed from is surprisingly heavy too [and is why I acquired us a dedicated cart for it in 2014].

Thus, by Friday afternoon we had the first load ready.  We had decided that the fridge on the tail was a loss, which Rick would drop off the next morning at the handy oubliette of the Newton dump -- where quite a few of Arisia's other random discards have gone over the years.  This was the fridge that had been disassembled "under Lisa's watchful eye" per Sandy's account -- except that in the process, the "professional movers" had basically destroyed the wiring through one of the door hinges that fed the ice-dispenser, and then the fridge never made it to con anyway.  A side-by-side type of fridge is really not the best type to use at a con, since much of the food storage tends toward a wide/flat format that's better suited to full-width cold space.  It had come as a free donation to begin with, so now it was easier to just get rid of it along with its highly suboptimal *glass* shelves. Semi-ironically, we still had *my* old fridge that I'd donated and picked up in 2013 during my first year's go at truck driving.

We headed up to Haverhill the next morning, where I was greeted by this scene upon walking up from the far lot.   Oh no.     Not more goddamn elevator problems. As it turned out, however, there was some kind of meet-up of elevator maintenance workers somewhere in the building that day, and there were in fact vans from several different repair companies parked around the area.  The freight elevator itself was fine; false alarm.

The big dock plate together with dumping the air-suspension made for a fairly level path off the truck.  It could have been quite a bit closer to the dock, to avoid that scenario where something snags the plate and slides it off the truck lip.  We probably could have also used the liftgate, fully raised but resting on the dock, like we had during the con loadout.  This feature may affect the type of equipment we request from rental companies going forward.

	We had already struck up a fairly congenial relationship with our USAi.net neighbors, and had even purchased their old pallet jack.  I had asked about this box of random tumbled-together equipment outside their door, which looked like a bunch of discards, and their lead guy Dave confirmed that it was all stuff they were getting rid of -- fair game for the taking if we wanted!  The main reason I'd asked was the large APC SmartUPS that had apparently been simply tossed in [here retrieved, pink arrow] and is exactly the kind that I enjoy refurbing with minor repairs and new batteries.  Today there were also some nice projector stands, and all the 56K modems anyone could possibly want these days.
At this point, after the truck was empty, I rolled my personal gear [plus the extra UPS carcass!] out and loaded the car with it.  There was another event in a couple of months it would likely be going to, but needed to be re-inventoried before then.  All that was enough activity for one day; we all dispersed home and would make the truly final effort on Sunday.

That next day was load-up like the Friday, except that now the old Storage was cleaned out to the walls.  One of the last things to go was that stupid wire-basket cart that's *always* in the way somehow, but keeps getting used to stack labels and stuff on during tagging parties.  But everything else, including all the archived printed matter and old T-shirts up in the "loft", had gotten recovered and moved.  The little bits of detritus left behind would get cleaned up before the lease expired, and it was likely that all these walls were doomed to be knocked out and the space merged with a neighboring one anyway. I think we left behind the big post-it on the right with Paul's fun diagram of NTSC signal timing from one of the Vidicon worksessions, but we have a backup.

And that was the last load out of there, with the final items as usual being the wheels to roll stuff on.  Today we had to get moving and deliver this to Haverhill before the day was out.

As people dispersed to transport I headed back inside and smacked the "close" button on the freight door in passing, and then suddenly had a thought, stopped and whipped around, pulling out the camera again.  The roll-door was still coming down, and I could still just see the bottom of the truck about to depart and the daylight slowly being cut off. That door was closing on a significant chapter of Arisia's history, and I wanted the moment. Then we were out of there.

Quite a few Arisians converged on Haverhill that afternoon, to help bring stuff in and to just see the new space.  The studly shelving all got combined and erected as a single unit, mostly for Tech storage, and exactly fit in between the last stud-wall pillar and the funny mid-floor level drop.  An organizational scheme would come later, but this would be so much better in general -- the big wagons could now roll *under* the bottom shelves instead of getting piled high with gear, just like I'd wanted in my diagram from four years before.

The scary room in the back with the toilet traps was dedicated to the long-term archival, with more new shelving put in to hold it all.  Lots of room left for further hoarding.

With no convenient power outlets near the fridges and freezers and more surrounding room, now we could do the intelligent thing and leave them powered off and blocked slightly open and ventilated over the intervening year.  The only caveat was that they'd need to be powered up and tested as part of the next con run-up.  But there's just no point in running them, *empty*, for an entire year in between like we had been doing.

	One final gratuitous long view up the room, now with *all* of our stuff in it!  There was still a generous amount of access and buffer floorspace left.  Some shuffling and compaction would still be needed, but basically we were finally really done with A'19 and the move.  We'd been through a surreal level of hell and back on this one, but persevered and survived and seemed to be in far better long-term circumstances afterward.  The inner-cabal folks who had come up that day seemed to agree, that this somehow felt more "homey" and full of better potential than the old storage space.
Maybe it's the warmer-feeling wood floor, or the layout, or the extra square footage... not sure, but overall this place just has a better vibe.  Maybe we could write amusing rhetoric about it like the blurb for the Park Plaza's "Avenue 34" space: "a uniquely old-world industrial ambience, with classically gritty reminders of its utilitarian history.  A versatile space for organizing your assets -- past, present, and future."