Back from Pasadena
Highlights of the Nebula conference:
The volunteer who came up and had a Barbie doll accept the Ray Bradbury award for the Barbie novel. Hollywood people seldom come or send an acceptor, and somebody was equipped!
Getting to meet and spend time with Vandi Varma, one of the two people who wrote the base operating system used by the U.S. Mars rovers. She’s a very neat person, a fine roboticist, and in grave danger of being asked even more questions about robotics and space probes…
Fantastic Mexican food and I got to try (bottled) pulque. I’m sure the fresh is better, but I liked it. Kind of alcoholic aqua fresca (not very alcoholic, it’s beer strength).
Just lots of great conversations about writing, travel, horses…alas, I missed the whale infodump. Picked the wrong table at the banquet!
Lowlights?
Westin Pasadena, do better.
When I arrived early, before check in, I went to see if they had a room and if not to store my luggage. In front of me in line was a group of three people who were not with SFWA. Two of them were elderly women who were visibly disabled…both were using walkers to get around.
No kidding, the front desk person said “We don’t have many of those kind of rooms.”
I was slightly disgusted and said when she gave me a non-ableist explanation for why my room wasn’t ready (I wasn’t expecting it to be ready a full hour before check in time), I casually said they should prioritize the accessible rooms. She glared at me.
Luggage stored, I then went to the hospitality suite. I hadn’t eaten since 9:30am local, and was hoping to find something to tide me over. I did, but there was also a tray of cookies. I couldn’t tell if they were oatmeal raisin or oatmeal raisin walnut. So I asked.
The employee left to check, came back, planted himself between me and the cookies and informed me “They’re from outside. We can’t guarantee cross contamination. You shouldn’t have one.”
I’d asked only if there were nuts in the cookies. I know some people have to worry about cross contamination. I don’t. I said “Are there nuts in the cookies?”
He continued to physically block my access to the cookies and repeat that they couldn’t guarantee cross contamination. He then suggested I have a granola bar instead.
The granola bars had nuts in them…
The next day I talked to his supervisor and requested proper labeling of the food (note, I had paid for access to this food, included in my conference fee).
Later, the cookies were back. Labeled “Homemade cookies.”
Tl;dr, I was belittled, treated like a child, and then my request for allergen labeling was met with a meaningless “homemade cookies” label. None of the food had allergen labeling, animal product labeling…just silly descriptive labels and those only came out after I asked for allergen labeling.
Yes, this is a rant, but I’m asking people to pay attention and to put pressure on the hospitality industry when their staff do things like this. I don’t want to get anyone fired.
I want to get them educated.