Today was the general hotel sale for San Diego Comic Con, or as it's not-so-affectionately nicknamed, Hotelpocalypse. It's the most stressful part of the whole process, in my opinion. Where trying to get tickets is an event that takes up a few hours of your Saturday in the hopes of being able to go, there are plenty of ways to maximize your chances, and that part has never even been an issue for me since I've been going. (Getting everything I want is another story, but at least I get something.) With hotels, you can't really do that. In the past, at 9 am PST, everyone opened a link to the hotel request form. You filled out all the information as fast as you possibly could: contact info, your top six hotel choices from a list, dates of stay, the names of your roommates. It's first come, first serve, so if you couldn't do it in thirty seconds, you probably didn't get anything. And even then, you might not have gotten what you wanted. If you filled out things for six downtown hotels and couldn't get things in as fast as others, you might end up a few miles away, or still end up with nothing.
This year they decided to make things more interesting. Rather than crashing their servers by flooding the site at once, we were given a link to a waiting room, where at 9 am PST it sorted us in random order. It was also made more interesting because it was a workday. At least when they do the ticket sales, it's a Saturday. And while normally Hotelpocalypse is the most stressful minute of my year, it's a minute. Even if I had a ton of work to do, I could sneak online for a few minutes to type and then get offline. This worried me this year, because I have a job that can get super busy and Comic Con International gave us no information on how exactly the new system was going to work or how long it would take. I was worried I'd have to take my lunch at 10:45 my time in order to not be working, I worried I'd spend my whole morning keyed up when I had more important things to do... I typed a lot on an old practice form, trying to get my speed up. Anytime a screen changed I jumped. I warned my (thankfully cool) boss that she was going to see me crazy today, though she denied it. But at one point she came over to ask me a work question and then finished with, "All right, you can go back to staring at the screen now."
So how'd it go? Actually pretty good.
At 9 am PST the waiting room changed to the queue, where we were given numbers. I was 11232, which wasn't great but not as bad as some people I'd seen. My friends got in before me, and some were done before I even started, so that's good. And because the numbers counted down, I was able to do some light work while waiting for my turn and didn't have to take it as my lunch hour. When I got to the form, though, I did screw up a little. You choose your hotels by selecting from a drop down menu, but a lot of them have similar names. If you type "Westin," there's one in the Gaslamp district and one downtown, and so I'd have to scroll down to select the one I wanted. I also made the mistake of typing more than the H in "Hilton San Diego Bayfront" and it took every available H hotel and added it to the remaining spots on my list, which meant I had to remove several and then select what I actually wanted. So I didn't do as well there as I would have liked, but it could have been much worse.
Afterwards it sort of ends up like the SATs, where you and your friends text or message in order to compare where you were and how you did and try to figure out what this means for your chances. There's adrenaline pumping, so as always the best way to deal with that is to babble endlessly with likeminded people about what you all just experienced, as if you all don't already know. And now the next step is to wait until I guess Friday, when emails will go out telling us what, if anything, we managed to get and whether we have a hotel room for our vacation.
SDCC: the only vacation that really fucking makes you work to go.
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