Tuesday, July 27, 2004

The Battle of the Lanyards
Posted by ekdurand@yahoo.com">Emily K. Durand at 5:57 PM -

Well, the jars of salsa from New Mexico were a hit -- and lucky for me, they were delivered to the delegates' hotel rooms late last night while they were at the Fleet Center.  The jars are actually "Governor Bill Richardson" *brand* salsa, somehow, complete with a picture of him.  And that's just the beginning of the high-end swag -- forget campaign buttons and those crispy white boater hats, there is lots of junk to get for free at the DNC.  And I do mean "junk" -- the salsa and the "Smush Bush" stress ball from the National Abortion Rights Action League were the only two remotely useful items I saw today.  But who turns down a totebag full of pens, chip clips, vitamin C tablets, Post-Its, and a Verizon golf towel? 

Nobody, that's who -- not just your average delegates, but actual U.S. Congressional representatives were hounding me today, asking, "When are we getting more goodie bags?" and "Can I get two more for my kids?"  Sheesh -- you'd think the welcome gift of New Jersey wine (no, seriously) would've been enough.  Lesson #1 of the day: people will pick up absolutely *anything* if it's free.  We could've put out "Satan for President" buttons on the table, and little old ladies would've grabbed them by the handful.  The trick, we learned, is straight from Economics 101: "Create the Illusion of Scarcity."  If you put 100 buttons on the table, people will take 3 or 4 without a blink.  If you only put out 6 at a time, they'll ask politely for one button.  Which reminds me: Best Button of the Day was "Bush is from Mars, Cheney is from Uranus."  Juvenile, yet satisfying.

So while we were spared the task of handing out gubernatorial salsa, and we enjoyed handing out the freebies, today brought some of the most thankless tasks of a volunteer: unseen, backbreaking labor and dealing with touchy customer service problems.  First, the labor: after the delegate breakfast, which went off very smoothly, the NJ coordinators learned from the hotel that the room they'd been using to store a mountain of forthcoming free junk to give out to the delegates had to be vacated for an event.  Conveniently. the strapping Young Aides were nowhere to be found (something about dancing with cable news anchorwomen until 3 am...) and so it fell to myself, fellow Buddy Aline, and NJ helper Christina to help Dave the Logistics Guy lug about 100 boxes down the hall.  Ugh -- do you have any idea how much a box of 250 Verizon golf towels weighs?

After a well-earned break in the Hospitality Suite (paid for by Novartis Pharmaceuticals, and God help me I drank a few bottles of Novartis-labeled spring water in there), Aline and I headed back to the front desk.  Now, for two days it had been constantly busy, with people picking up credentials, press passes, briefing books, schedules, etc.  New business like that settled down quite a bit today, but the customer service battle was only beginning.  Lesson #2 for the day: teach a man to fish, feed him for a day; give a man a free fish, and tomorrow he'll ask for another.  We started to run low on the plastic credential sleeves and lanyard cords, since it was assumed each person would only need one.  So naive!  People came by who lost theirs, left theirs in their room, who wanted a "fresh one" (?!), who were from another state delegation that was handing out inferior gear (stick-on name labels, the horror!), and who wanted, once again, "two more for my kids."  Sigh.  Luckily, we started to get armloads of materials, buttons, and shiny new lanyards from various political groups hoping to reach out to the delegates, so we directed people to take the precious lanyards along with them.  Unfortunately, this led to a misunderstanding over some very nifty items called LidRocks, a combination lanyard-CD-CDROM-soft drink lid-ticket to the Black Eyed Peas show at Avalon tonight...oooops, they weren't supposed to be given out like Halloween candy.  Again, OOOOPS.  It's kind of a long story.  This led to some customer service woes of the, "Yes, I regret to inform you that the really cool lanyard thingie I gave you ten minutes ago, well, I need it back."  Ouch.

But overall, the Buddies conducted ourselves well and helpfully.  Tomorrow will be our marathon day, from the delegate breakfast to the late night Governor's Reception, so we wanted to take it a little easy.  When things quieted down in the afternoon, Aline and Carolyn and I headed over to the Sonesta in Cambridge in the hopes of hearing Michael Moore, Howard Dean, Robert Reich and Barbara Ehrenreich speak -- and found many, many hundreds of people lining up all the way around the block, in front of us.  Ooops again.  But we did get a nice walk around the empty city -- empty but for a police helicopter hovering over the Charles.  We also had our bags searched on the Orange Line, in a very quick and professional manner -- they even gave us a little card explaining our "right" to refuse (and be ejected from the T and possibly arrested, but I digress).  But nobody objected -- not even the bearded guy with the t-shirt reading "Homeland Security: Protecting America Since 1492."  I love this town.

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