Settled?

There has been lots of communication between Rubber Trooper and myself over the past week or so based on our perceptions of each others perspectives of the Rubbout 21 weekend. I felt really bad that I was particularly focusing on RT's account as a base for defending our organizational decisions but he did make a lot of points where we fell short or underestimated outcomes, but as I've said, there was more going on behind the scenes than what a lot of the attendees may or may not have been able to appreciate. First and foremost, we wanted to plan a weekend with lots of options. There had been criticism that there was TOO much going on for Rubbout 20, so we wanted to simplify the schedule for Rubbout 21, which we did, but because it was on a long weekend, there ended up being several other events going on that we ended up cross-promoting with and added to the schedule. In the end, it ended up being a weekend with as many options as Rubbout 20! I look at this as a good thing; it's better to have too many events than not enough, right? That is my thinking, I think some people will disagree with me, and this is food for thought for Rubbout 22 too.

Secondly, there seemed to be displeasure with the fact that maybe too many of the events this year were dance parties. I defended this by saying we needed to have events that would pull in numbers of guys that may not necessarily be weekend passholders or rubbermen, but would pay entry and drink, therefore giving us money. In some ways this worked, in other ways it didn't. At any rate, the discussion that has started about this will certainly be considered in the decision making about venues and events for next year.

Some of the things we thought would be a win for Rubbout 21 didn't work out as intended, and some things that we didn't put a lot of work into actually worked out far beyond our expectations! It's things like that that make a complex event like Rubbout and interesting event to plan and execute.

As I had stated before, the biggest success in my opinion of Rubbout 21 was the fact that all the events executed pretty much according to plan which made me very happy, and some of the feedback about the events has been very positive. It's unfortunate that most of the feedback has been critical and there hasn't been enough positivity to stroke my fragile ego, but I guess that's the evil nature of the event planning business; you simply don't hear about the good things, unfortunately it seems that people are just prone to point out the negative things, but that's just human nature. It just disappoints me that there isn't more positivity particularly about Rubbout - it's a party after all, it's not a political movement or anything in the least bit serious - though from the perspective of the organizer, there is a aura of seriousness even about Rubbout.

That's basically all I wanted to say on the issue, now it's basically closed for me. There is still a lot of follow-up to do for Rubbout 21 but I am already thinking ahead towards Rubbout 22.