It’s been a turbulent time for us here at Auto Assembly. For over two months now, our forced hiatus has left many of you frustrated, confused and quite frankly left wondering what has been happening regarding Auto Assembly 2014. As we have said on here, we have been in the incredibly unfortunate position of being restricted heavily in terms of what we have been able to do with regards to the convention which has left us frustrated here just as much as we know it has done for all of you.
As we have said on here, we were without a working PC immediately after Auto Assembly 2013 meaning that we were not only unable to process bookings for 2014, but also had no access to the majority of our records or emails leaving us unable to work on these. Accessing emails by any other means proved nigh on impossible and simultaneously we were thrust into an impending house move just four weeks after the convention had ended. Anyone who has moved house will testify that it is one of the most stressful things that you can go through in life but doing this in the aftermath of an event like Auto Assembly – having to organise everything at such short notice when we didn’t even know that we were moving until a few days after we returned – became a logistical nightmare!
Moving into a larger house has had its benefits. We have been able to convert a spare room in the house to one that I am using as a library / games room and office for Auto Assembly giving me more space to work in. We do know that some of you may have been under the impression that we have been moving a professional office elsewhere, but having this space in our house is proving to be a real boon, but that has come with problems as well. We’ve had to find everything to unbox (and we still have a large room full of boxes!), and this room needed to be decorated and furnished before it could be used – something that took time after an extremely expensive move.
That would have been sorted then if it hadn’t been for connection issues. We were offline completely for several weeks after moving in, and then had a wireless network in the house. We did get a wireless connection to my room upstairs but because of the construction of the house we found that we had virtually no signal – even with a wireless booster – and managed little more than 5 minutes an hour of active (and very slow) internet. That simply wasn’t going to work. So what were we going to do to get the convention back up and running?
Well, more expense has ensued and yesterday I purchased a powerline networking solution for the house and not only is it proving to be fast, but it’s stable as well. As a result from today we will be doing the following:
- Processing bookings in the order that they have been received
- Distributing Non-Attendee Packs (With these we are awaiting the delivery of t-shirts. Also, we now live several miles from our nearest post office and need to use two buses to get there so we won’t be able to post as many in one trip as we used to but we will ship them as soon as possible)
- Release details of Press Pass applications
- Release the 2014 Volunteer Application Pack
- Release the 2014 Attendee Information Pack
- Upload new videos to our Youtube Channel
- Answer all your emails and questions
- Finalise details with the Hilton regarding accommodation (initial confirmation emails will be sent without these but the room booking details will be sent shortly afterwards)
- And much more…!
I have said it before but please bear with us on this. There is over two months of catch up for us to deal with and well over 1,000 emails for me to trawl through and weed out a lot of spam. It will take a few weeks for us to get back up to speed but we will get around to everything so if you don’t get a reply to emails straight away, please be patient and we will get back to you as quickly as we can.
Anyway, thanks for your understanding and we’re looking forward to seeing you all in August 2014 for Europe’s Largest Transformers Convention. Let’s celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Transformers in style and have an incredible weekend!
Simon Plumbe
Auto Assembly Committee Head
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