DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I planned to post photos from Wired Magazine’s NextFest, but as it turns out I’ll only be able to show you one: the ticket line.

We arrived at 2pm. We saw two ticket lines of depressing length. But it was a nice afternoon, so we waited.

After 30 minutes we were near the front of the line, maybe 10 minutes from the ticket booth. We noticed that a third line had formed to the right — another ticket line? No, because everyone in this new line held a ticket in their hands. I followed the new line to its head at the front door of the exposition hall. This was the line to get into the show!

It was huge. Everyone who had been ahead of us in the two ticket lines was now in one (very) long line to get into the building. The staffperson at the front door said that they’d reached the building’s capacity; due to safety regulations, they could only allow new people into the show after other people left.

This meant we weren’t waiting for a short process like a ticket-purchase transaction. Rather, we were waiting for 500 people to leave the NextFest. We might be standing in the sun for another hour.

So we bailed. Between parking (a 15-minute task) and walking four blocks (another 10 minutes) and waiting in line, we’d invested nearly an hour already, only to learn that an event about future technology, put on by self-proclaimed futurists, can easily be bogged down by lousy capacity planning and poor crowd control.