These are some of the pics I took from this years VGXPO in Philly. It was a nightmare trying to get in if you didnt pre-register online, largely due to the fact that the setup looked like it had been set up by a group of five year olds. The lines themselves were not a problem so much as the fact that they were everywhere, and many of them led to just groups of people standing idly around. No, I'm not kidding. We started out in a line going into the building, a line we were directed into and told this was the line for people looking to buy a ticket inside. This would have been fine, except there was ZERO supervision being conducted to make sure that the lines themselves worked, and halfway through the wait you could see people just walking up to the doors and walking in, completely negating the line. They would also close the doors after a certain number of people had gotten in, for what reason I'll never know, but the direct result was that with all the line cutting going on, we managed to stay in one spot before about a half an hour before I figured out that the only way in was just to walk towards the door as soon as it opened and just walk through groups of other people. Finally when we got inside, we were told that there were two lines; one for cash and one for credit, and that the credit line was faster. Well that would have been awesome if they had bothered to set up a system to seperate the two lines, because halfway through the building the lines converges into one. There was a girl ONE GIRL, telling people to form into two lines.........it was madness. Finally we said fuck it, and just started walking in between people, and when we got to the end of the credit line, there was one guy, directing ONE PERSON AT A TIME up an escalator to the upper level. And the line for cash? That line, which stretched to the back of the building and easily had three hundred people in it, ended in a group of people, most of them staff mixed with patrons, standing in a corner and chatting.
When we actuallygot up the elevator, we had to wait in line to buy our tickets online AND THEN GET INTO ANOTHER LINE THAT WAITED FOR AN EMAIL FROM THE TICKETS WE HAD JUST BOUGHT SO THAT THEY COULD GIVE US TICKETS. It was insane. I remember less about the XPO than I do about the bullshit it took to get into the damn thing. There was just no order at all. It was a trainwreck. Next year I'll be preordering and getting there early, SO I CAN WAIT IN LINES THAT DON'T LEAD TO ANYTHING.
