Penguicon.info

Penguin is the name that Penguicon gives to its volunteers. Ideally, their jobs will consist of doing the various jobs that are required to make the convention happen. Conventions run on unskilled volunteers who are suddenly recruited from among the attendees who want to get reimbursed. At other conventions they are called Gofers or Gophers.

If you want to get your membership reimbursed (on condition that the con makes money, which so far it always has done), sign up on the website or in the hotel lobby at the convention to be a Penguin. These do the countless little unskilled jobs that need doing while the convention is in progress. The Volunteer Wrangler, (this year Anna Held-Petrak) will take down your name and address at the convention (for mailing a check if you aren't there on Sunday). She will give you a form where the people you assist will write their department and the length of time you worked for them and their initials. Make sure you give those people this sheet and make them fill it out so you get credited!

You will get access to a Penguin Pit (there is a room for male and another for females) to sleep & store your stuff at any time of day. Only the Volunteer Wrangler has the keys and will let you in. If you sleep there Friday night the PenguinWrangler has the right to find you on Saturday and assign you to do something. There will be a PizzaParty Saturday night for those who have worked four hours.

Then on Sunday at 3PM, if you have accumulated six hours of work (including volunteering, being a panel member, scheduled gamemastering and/or giving presentions), and if the convention is in the black, you will be written a check for your registration fee. If you aren't there but a buddy turns in your form, you will be mailed your check.

The first opportunity to help is on Thursday before the convention. We need people to go with our MinisterOfInventory to carry stuff out of the storage cube and into the truck, and out of the truck into the hotel. Each hour spent doing this counts one and a half times toward your rewards!

- DoorGuard. All you have to do is sit at a door to a function room of the convention checking that each person entering that room has a membership badge. Almost all ScienceFiction conventions are thought to do this, but in fact some do not, and PenguiCon does or does not based on the circumstance. Since attendees set up their desktop computers in the [ComputerLounge4.0] there should always be a DoorGuard there. Sometimes we may have a DoorGuard for ConSuite, but not DealersRoom. Our policy is to definitely not turn away any paying customer from the DealersRoom just because they aren't with our convention.

- BeerTroll. We will not let you do this unless we know you and trust you. This person checks drivers licenses and other government-issued proofs of age, and dispenses beer. At PenguiCon the BeerTroll must check government-issued ID with each and every serving of alcohol. No hand stamps, no age-related badges, those are too easy to falsify. Drinking under age or sharing your drink with someone under age is not tolerated and will get the sharer and the underage drinker kicked off the premises immediately and with no registration refund.

- in Consuite refilling all the snack dishes and putting more pop in the bathtub full of ice. These volunteers are also the ones whose absence would make the whole ConSuite unhappy. And nobody wants that.

- packing up audiovisual equipment on Sunday.

- counting the people attending each event, and giving presenters and panelists the signal that they have five minutes left, so that the next event starts on schedule.