844 MWG - The People

Monday, August 21, 2006

I don't know how many people attended the Mensa World Gathering. I had heard a few months ago that they had over 2,000 registered. There would have been more since then, and people were arriving as early as Tuesday with no pre-registration or hotel reservations. I suppose a future issue of the Journal will have the details.

There was a map outside the hospitality room for people to stick a pin in to show where they were from:
Observation - Mensans are getting older. I noticed it, and overheard several others remark on it. We were heavily into late middle age, with more than a few in their 70s and 80s and perhaps even beyond. I also noticed that at least half, maybe more, of the members are frankly obese, and half of those are into the morbidly obese range. We're talking over 450 pounds. So many men and women who walked by rolling from side to side, so many backsides rising and heaving and roiling with every step. It was pretty ugly.

By the third day, many had rented 3-wheeled buggies from the hotel, and used them to go from room to room. (More like hospitality room to restock the snack load to meeting room to hospitality room to meeting room to ....) I was disgusted by the number of horribly fat people who seemed to be stuffing yummies into their faces constantly, even during the sessions.

Worse was the cellophane crinklers. Hey folks, learn how to do it! If you insist on eating through a meeting, learn to hold the bag in one hand, and pour the candies quietly into the other hand. Cramming your fat paw into the crinkle crinkle crinkle bag every 8 seconds is incredibly annoying! Not to mention disgusting.

Weight and age became problems when it was discovered that the hotel trolleys (golf-cart looking trams that could ferry up to nine passengers around the lake to their rooms) didn't run after 10:30 pm. The sessions ran until long after midnight. I walked out of the conference center at 10:45 Tuesday night and found two very fat women and an elderly man with a cane engaged in an argument with a trolley driver. They were insisting that the hotel had said the trolley ran until 11 pm. The trolley driver was insisting that they stopped at 10:30. He gave in when he realized that there was otherwise no way these people could possibly make it to their rooms on the other side of the lake. I hope they tipped him, but these being Mensans (notoriously tight-fisted) I doubt it.

The next day, this appeared: Mensa had sprung for some additional trolley time.

The hotel said the trolleys ran "every five minutes". Bull poopy! As far as I could tell, there were only two of them, and you would wait easily 15 to 25 minutes before one made it around the lake, depending on how many stops it had to make, and by then the number of people waiting was so large that fewer than half could get on, so one actually ended up waiting more than a half hour. I rode the trolley only once, and then only to check it out. I could walk to my room in 20 minutes, so the wait didn't seem worth it.

In every group of Mensans, there is usually at least one who is determined to "show up" the speaker. These are the ones who will study up on the topic ahead of time, and then ask "innocent" questions carefully designed to either trip up the speaker, or make it look like they know more than the speaker. I didn't see too much of that this time. The audiences were remarkably respectful. I don't know why. Of course, there were still a few, and it was funny, because every time it happened, it was obvious the questioner had been working at formulating his question instead of listening, because when they triumphantly asked the zinger question, the speaker had already answered it in his presentation moments before. Now that was funny!

Well, there was one presentation where it became annoying. I think maybe I didn't write about this one (there were several I didn't mention). It was about walking tours of Paris, and there were three women in the room who wanted to make sure that everyone knew that they were at least as familiar with Paris as the speaker. And since there were the three of them, they then tried to out-Paris each other. It began to be difficult for the speaker to continue her presentation. No matter what she recommended to see, one of these three had something better.

Here's a view of the hospitality room:
The snack tables were across the back wall, and there was a bar in the back right corner. I'm not sure what they had at the bar, but it didn't look like it was heavily patronized. Along the left wall there were four (count 'em, four!) computers for the use of the several thousand members. Fifteen minute time limit, enforced I assume by the next person in line to use one. I didn't even try.

There were Mensans working with the hotel security, which I thought was pretty neat. They had badges and pagers and all. One of them was in the back of the room in a session, and I guess he forgot to turn the pager/scanner off or down, because we heard:
SKREEK!
First voice: "Um, Joe? Do you know if anyone has found that lost package yet?"
Joe: "Lost package? What lost package? (Pause) Oh, do you mean the kid?"
CLICK!