There’s going to be a bit of complaining here, fair warning, but here’s how my Saturday at Dallas Sci Fi Expo went. All things concerned, unless like Barrowman comes back, I don’t think I’ll go to another one, at least not at Irving Convention Center (the one in May is at the larger Dallas Convention Center, and Nathan Fillion is coming, so eh….yeah I’ll probably be going). Long post too.

First off it was like 20 degrees F when we got there. We could easily see our breath. And we lined up in the parking garage. I feel even sorrier for people who didn’t preorder tickets, but they weren’t to be allowed in until everyone who pre-purchased got through.

So we waited and shivered in the cold for about 45 minutes until they let us in the building so we could get our wrist bands. Great….except no, Then they sent us back out to the parking garage for another 45 minutes until I guess the doors ‘officially’ opened. Prax was dressed as Donna and didn’t have a heavy coat and my Jack coat really isn’t that warm, but I ended up giving her mine for a bit to warm up. My roommate’s hands and toes were pretty froze by the time we got inside.

Hell we got inside and a fire alarm was going off. Nobody even cared or paid attention because damned if we were going to go back out in that weather.

The other main problem, besides general crowd management (clearly they did not expect this many people?) was the way the photo ops were run. I went up around noon after one swing around the vendor area to see about getting the Karl Urban autograph. He wasn’t there but they were saying he should be back from his photo ops by 1230, okay. No biggie. 

They didn’t schedule enough time between photo ops, especially for the bigger name guests. Karl didn’t get back up to the autograph line until one. I didn’t get up to him until 130. So that ended up being an hour and a half wait for me. And I heard as I was leaving that the general wait for him was about that long, with a line stretching out the door.

The Doctor Who Q&A was at 2. Needless to say I didn’t get into that either. At about that point too they had the escalators shut down i guess because of again, crowds, so people weren’t being allowed up to the 4th floor where the Q&A and autographs were.

At least the line for the cafe wasn’t THAT bad, even if $17 is ridiculous for two hamburgers, two drinks and a bag of chips. That’s expected for a con.

After that we went up to get in line for the Karen Gillian/Tony Curran double. That was a clusterfuck too, with, again, poor line management, confusion about lines (Karen singles vs doubles, the location of the back of the line, etc.) And of course because they don’t schedule enough time between photo ops, everyone was being pushed through as fast as possible.

Got out of there and my Sylvester McCoy photo op was in about an hour, so we decided to hang around upstairs for when they started lining up for it. They called for it a little bit later and off into another line and room to wait for that.

And the photo shoot before Sylvester’s ran over. So THAT started almost 30 minutes later then expected.

Get back to where the others were waiting, figured we’d at least have our double photo done by since it had been  nearly 2 hours. Nope. Apparently they were printing photos out ‘randomly’ and with no rhyme or reason. Plus when they were putting them out in the pickup room there was little to no organization. My roommate had been checking for a while, and no dice. She was getting frustrated, so went back to the dealer’s room.

Sylvester McCoy photos started showing up while I was still looking for our Karen/Tony double.

Our double finally showed up…and it was fucked up. Whoever had ‘cropped’ it, damn near cut Karen out AND there were a couple strangers in the background because it was like a weird angle instead of a normal front looking photo. My roommate got back about then and she took the photo to go politely yell at them. They didn’t apologize, just said they’d fix it by seven when the place closed.

Meantime I found a gaggle of elevens and a ten. We ended up drawing a crowd, found an Amy pond and people wanted photos. I handed out cards and I’m hoping someone sends me a copy or I can find one because it was actually the most fun I had all day. One dude in a star trek outfit pulled his phaser and we got a photo of about a dozen doctors/me/amy pointing sonics at the guy. It was pretty hilarious.

Finally I got my Sylvester McCoy photo, and thank God that turned out okay. A little bit after my roommate found another version of the double that was cropped correctly in the room. We were supposed to be getting two prints, but we were all too tired to argue any more, so we left, with my roommate saying she’d contact the company, since we were feeling pretty darn screwed on our hundred dollars we dropped for the op.

All in all it took us nearly 3 hours to get one copy of the double photo op. Not happy. We ended up leaving  Dallas around 730 and getting home close to 11pm. We’d wanted to leave earlier, but well, photo op problems.