How we learned to stop worrying and ditch the conference

Happy Halloween. I was planning on going to a haunted house tonight, but I am battling a cold and did not feel up to it. That makes the being overworked harder. I have been bringing my laptop home at night so I could get some extra work done, but there is a bed here, and I can’t resist it. There is no bed in the office so I can work pretty well.

Anyway, last night I talked about people sucking, so it seemed like a good lead-in for the second half of our San Francisco experience. Yes, I wrote about the places we saw and the things we did, but not why we were there or what we were supposed to be doing.

In April, my friend Christy and I attended a mid-singles conference in Huntington Beach. Normally there are conferences and things for young single adults (under 30) and adult singles (over 30). With a wide range like that, it is easy for a 35 year old to feel like she doesn’t really want to date people her father’s age. The mid-singles conference was for ages 28-40 and seemed like a good idea. We went, had a pretty good time, and while there saw another one advertised.

This one was for San Francisco, in September. The age range was a little wider (27-45), but it was still mid-singles. When it was announced, the person doing so stated flat out that they weren’t going to be doing all these workshops and service projects—it was just going to be a party. They were reserving a fleet of motorized trolleys for a city tour, Ghirardelli Square for sundaes, a cruise around the harbor, and the De Young Museum.

On the one hand, shallow is not really a recommendation, and if it was hard to get to know people in Huntington Beach, this would be much worse. On the other hand, I hadn’t been to San Francisco beyond one afternoon when I was ten or twelve, and there were things I wanted to see, so it seemed like a good idea. Also, the shallower it was, the better the odds of getting my sisters to come.

We talked about it and decided to go with one stipulation. There was no way they were going to go on a boat dance, which is what the harbor cruise was. They had a bad experience many years ago, and as lame as dances can be (saying this as someone who used to love them), putting it into a venue where your only escape is to jump overboard is a risky proposition. I agreed, so we planned on our Alcatraz tour for that night.

Checking in at Huntington Beach, they looked up our names and registrations and gave us our wristbands, a program where they stapled the places and times we needed to be and put in our gifts. (These were a notebook and a key chain shaped like a surfboard, so nothing fancy, but they were organized for that.) In San Francisco, at the De Young Museum, they looked up our names and gave us a wristband. There was an attempt to start a scavenger hunt, but it didn’t work out, so we were basically roaming free until it was time to board the trolleys at 8:30.

Initial reports had indicated this would be a reception and there would be food and drinks. That is probably why so many people were desperately trying to get food at the museum café. We had eaten before, and it was a good thing. At 8:30 we found out that the buses would be late. This was a slight concern for those who drove, because the garages were going to close at midnight, and they needed to be back. Also, for those who were taking taxis, hoping for one in the dark in the middle of Golden Gate State Park could be risky.

Finally, the trolleys came. There were supposed to be two kinds of rides: trolleys for plain sightseeing and double-decker buses for speed dating. We had decided to stick with the trolleys so we could concentrate on the sights. At the head of the line was a U-Haul full of the souvenir blankets, which they were tossing out for people to grab. As we tried to board the first trolley, a girl blocked the entrance insisting on one guy to board for every two girls who got on.

That was a slight concern, because the ratios should not matter for plain sightseeing, but the real issue with barring entrance to a trolley is that they are actually four entrances, so people just started streaming in. We found seats, and as it was pulling away a woman with a microphone in the middle talked to us about speed dating. She was really special, so I will write more about her in a minute, but first I would just like to point out how easy it would have been to have people indicate whether they were interested in speed dating or not during online registration, and then assign them a bus or trolley number at check-in while handing them their blanket.

Anyway, this time we felt like we should ask, so I mentioned to our group activity leader that we were under the impression that speed dating was only on the buses, wasn’t that what was going on? I don’t know what’s going on, she confessed, but that did not stop her, despite the fact that there were three men on the bus for about fifteen women. So she kept calling two-minute intervals for people to trade off asking questions, but we could not move around on the moving vehicle, so we were just supposed to turn to different sides.

She wasn’t the type to let a lack of information or resources deter her. She had volunteered to be a tour guide despite knowing nothing about San Francisco after all, which she admitted. She actually asked the driver to act as our guide because of that, which he declined, but she was so bad that after a while he started pointing things out to us and telling us about them. She was still able to impart a lot of information about herself to us, so I guess she contributed.

We did have a few stops, including one to get cocoa, and people did change seats some. I did end up with a guy next to me at one point. He seemed to be on the older end of the scale, and my sisters later asked about his shop glasses, so yes, I guess he looked like a nerd, but that was not the problem.

He started out sounding a little off, by talking about how he was a healer and he healed people with his hands, and how people are sick because they eat fake food instead of real food. Although he was sounding a little bit off, I have been thinking about trans-fats and high-fructose corn syrup lately, and I tried to find common ground. I’m polite. Sadly I think this was a tactical error, as it may have only encouraged him to get crazier.
Suddenly, after finding out I was a history major, he was asking if I had ever studied the real people’s history of the United States, not the one in books, and about things that God wouldn’t do, and how revelation isn’t real because it happens on the astral plane, but the woman telling him he was a healer but she couldn’t do anything with him because there were seven other spirits around him stopping her was real. Anything I said in partial agreement resulted in still being contradicted and spouting off more, and hey, if I want that kind of a conversation I’ll look up my father. And then there was less and less I could pretend to agree to at all. He was just so eager to show me the error of my ways and I have dealt with crazy and with arrogant before but at the same time when you are not even cute and you have bad breath? Maybe he was rich, but I didn’t find out. I later heard him advising our tour guide to eat nuts and berries to train for her swim, and saw another girl shaking her head when he was talking to her.

So we made it back, and our trolley driver took pity on the poor naïve Mormons, so he offered anyone going into downtown a ride, and even though his initial plan seemed to only be to drop us off to where we could easily get a cab or walk, he ended up taking everyone up to their hotel doors. It may have been the residual horror from finding out that two of the girls were staying at the YMCA. He called out an extra “Be careful” when they got off, let me tell you. His compassion was nonetheless appreciated.

So, from our experience so far, things were disorganized, the people were a little more uptight and shallow, and since we were there for fun, we did not feel it would be responsible to put these people in charge of our fun, especially since we had realized by this point that we wanted to see everything on this trip so we would not have to go back. So, we did not go back to the conference, at all. The way the sundae party was scheduled we could not attend it and make our tour anyway, so it was just missing the games at Golden Gate Park and the Sunday activities, and we could live with this.

So, do I have regrets? Not really. For one thing, we did see the city and met our goals there. Also, I ran into one old friend, and through her got the number for another old friend, so there were some connections made, even if they were not male.

We did not end up getting any of the food we paid for, but I heard from someone else that the Jamba Juice never showed up Saturday, much like the reception, so going would not have helped that. I guess it was kind of an expensive blanket.

I would not go to a San Francisco conference again, but I would try another city, and I would go back to Huntington Beach. It is playing into stereotypes, but yes, I prefer beach bums to urban hipsters. Also, I would really like to throw one here.