{"id":501,"date":"2004-07-10T13:54:38","date_gmt":"2004-07-10T18:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/07\/10\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-19T19:48:08","modified_gmt":"2005-10-19T23:48:08","slug":"wallet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/07\/10\/wallet\/","title":{"rendered":"Wallet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I have a bad habit while shopping: after I take my wallet out, I tend to drop it, my change, and anything else that happened to be in my hands into the shopping bag with the stuff I just bought. This often means I have to hunt around for my stuff the next time I want to go out.<\/p>\n

Today was an orientation session for DNC volunteers, so I got up early and headed down to Alewife so I could take the T into Boston. As I descended the steps from the parking garage into the station, I reached into my bag — and realized that I was not going to find my wallet.<\/p>\n

I stopped short in horror. In the wallet are my drivers’ license, credit cards, ATM card, any cash I have — in short, without it I’m broke and without means of getting any more money. This was a problem: to get T tokens I needed cash, but more importantly, to get out of the parking garage, I would need $4.50.<\/p>\n

Pawing through my bag managed to turn up a grand total of $1, and so I headed back to my car to see if I could manage to scrounge enough to exit the garage.<\/p>\n

But once there, fortune smiled upon me, because not only am I stupid, I am also BRILLIANT. I found that I had stashed $15 in the glove compartment. Saved! I luckily also had my old (way old) expired drivers’ license in my bag, so I was able to go to the orientation after all and check in without incident.<\/p>\n

The orientation<\/b><\/p>\n

This took place at the Hynes, which was fine by me, as I have never actually been in it before. Checking in didn’t take too long, and I was handed my orientation packet. It looks as if they had a really high volunteer turnout in spite of the nightmare they’re trying to make it to actually get into the city that week, so most people only have a handful of shifts even if they volunteered for more (I volunteered for 12 or 15 and got 2). I’m not going to complain — it’s not free for me to get there and money is tight, so the fewer times I need to go, the better.<\/p>\n

There were refreshments available, but all of the juice was gone and I don’t drink coffee, so I was out of luck for something to drink. It was poor planning on their part not to have water available, which I hope is not a hint of more silly oversights to come.<\/p>\n

Menino was there and gave a short spiel, then everyone was sent up to the ballroom level for the orientation session. Now, when you think of volunteer orientation, you naturally think they’re going to explain to you what your role is, where you should go, what you should do — right?<\/p>\n

WRONG. Instead, it was some sort of customer service revival meeting, where we all had to practice having conversations with the person next to us, shake hands with each other and shout back to the customer service evangelist who was leading the session.<\/p>\n

It was very strange and while perhaps useful in a life lesson sense, did not prepare us in any way to assist specifically at the convention. The schedule they gave us did not have anything by way of details as to exactly where we should be — I need to go to ‘Volunteer HQ’, which was described as ‘Hynes Convention Center’. Great. That’s real specific, thanks.<\/p>\n

So, that lasted about an hour and 15 minutes, and then I left and came home. If I had known it would be that short, I would have gone to Porter and parked there — I was a wee bit afraid it would run closer to 4 hours with T trips back and forth, but it was under 3.<\/p>\n

Hynes Observation<\/b><\/p>\n

This is an observation mainly of interest to Anime Boston folks — we were in Ballrooms A, B and C with the dividing walls up between them. There was MASSIVE SOUND BLEED. We could hear everything the woman next door was saying to her group and all of the noise of the crowd in there. It was very distracting and would be a serious problem if you were trying to do something like watch anime.<\/p>\n

I have no idea what these rooms might be used for at AB, if at all, but it is something to be aware of. <\/p>\n

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I have a bad habit while shopping: after I take my wallet out, I tend to drop it, my change, and anything else that happened to be in my hands into the shopping bag with the stuff I just bought. This often means I have to hunt around for my stuff the next time I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}