You can thank John Fish for that!!!
Anyway, one thing I'm working on is having more power outlets available to everyone at least during the breaks. I know that was a concern last year in Las Vegas and I'm doing my best to rectify that this year.
One of the great things about having the Mirage's Grand Ballroom all week long is that we get these spacious rooms that can be closed for individual drafts and auctions, and yet opened up so that we can have 8-10 Main Event drafts at once in an open space on Saturday morning. It's such a beautiful sight to behold to have the Stage of Champions at the front and 40,000 square feet for 8-10 drafts at once.
But one of the bad things about having this open space is that power outlets are hard to find and few inbetween. Those airwalls don't have any electrical outlets and thus the only place for plug-ins is through the floor. And the Audio/Visual company (Encore) has to activate those floor power outlets and of course they charge me for any of those. There are some outlets in the wall along the left side, but again those are hard to find and they include only four rooms that we use outside of the Main Events on Saturday.
What we've always done is ask everyone to bring laptops with strong batteries and we'll help you power up during the breaks. But again, last year it was tough to find outlets in those ballrooms and even in the hallway. And in football, someone tried to hook his laptop into our one power strip we have for the HD projector and our computer and of course pulled all of our plugs out. That auction was delayed until we could fire everything up again. Hooking into that one outlet is discouraged and now really discouraged after that.
So now what do we do? Are some people NOT going to do back-to-back auctions or drafts because of a lack of power to rev up their laptops? That could happen.
What I'm doing now is buying a dozen or so power strips with some extension cords and I'll try to at least have an outlet or two available at each U to power up during the breaks. It's unlikely we'll have availability for everyone throughout the whole auction because we have no idea which floor outlets will be close to everyone, but at the very least we can power from our main power strip and put two outlets available from there for people during the breaks. That way no one will have trouble finding a power source.
It won't be perfect, but it will be better than what we had last year. It just was so tough for people to find an outlet to power up during the break that some folks had little to no power by the end of their auctions. I think we can alleviate that and hopefully the Mirage won't complain about what we're doing. They overcharge us for all of this A/V equipment and hopefully they'll let us slide in an extra power strip or two for our customers.
That's the plan for now and we'll do the same for live NFFC drafts and auctions. These bigger ballrooms just don't have the wall outlets like smaller ballrooms do and we'll try to help you out, especially when you have 5+ hour auctions to deal with. Hope this helps.
Oh, and the Mirage has free WiFi throughout the Convention Center. No worries there.
Thanks all and you can buy me a Corona in Las Vegas for this fine idea!!!