PughettiVA

Seems a lot of the mismanagement of Expo is coming to light now. I guess it’s only fair for me to share my experience with that. As some of you already know, I direct a project by the name of Sonic Alter. In 2024 before that year’s Expo, knowing that me and all of my friends would be attending expo that year (including some of the Alter staff) I decided that it would be super cool if we had our own panel. I applied for it as soon as I could and got to work, amidst a bunch of internal problems on our end, what made things worse was how we received a panel confirmation email about a month and a half out from Day 1 of the convention. When this whole time we weren’t even sure if we had one or not. That sent our team into overdrive to get as much as we could done for the panel, which included some sleepless nights for me up until the day I flew out to Dallas. Fast forward to a day out from the convention, our slot for weeks at that point had been on that sunday, in the last slot of the day, which would make us the last panel of Sonic Expo 2024. We were on our way to the airport to pick up a friend when my watch started to ring, I picked up to hear @PughettiVA on the other end telling me that our panel had been moved from Sunday to TOMORROW. The first day of the con. (Even though on our end we were still finishing up things down to the last minute. ) Without any prior warning, notice, or whatever about it. we were scrambling to try and get things situated and sorted out. When reaching out to Phoenix failed, we spoke to Addie, who managed to restore our initial timeslot. However, the website was never updated, despite the promise of it being fixed by upper management, meaning only a small group of our close friends knew the panel was still happening. Come the day of the panel and the majority of the AV equipment we requested (namely microphones) weren’t provided to us and we were told that we had to use our big theater voices and project. Which was already a big enough issue when we had to fight against the volume of the karaoke room that was directly behind us. That whole debacle left me and the team burnt out. It’s insanely unfortunate to see management issues persist years later but I can only hope that the backlash gets noticed and the need for change is brought to their attention.