(I'm reporting live this week from Wired magazine's Nextfest, where I am volunteering in exchange for a free ticket; these reports are being written on my Treo from the various NF events and posted in real time throughout the week. Don't forget, I'm posting live photos and audio throughout the week as well at my other blog, [metafeed], also being sent straight from my Treo in real time.)

Greetings from Nextfest!

It's been a surreal fucking day.

The weirdness all started yesterday afternoon, in fact, when I got a call from Eliana Sur, Project Coordinator of Nextfest and my personal liason. With my hearing problems, of course, I missed the original call, so dialed her back a few minutes later.

"Oh, hi, Jason. It's Eliana."

"Eliana?"

"Eliana Sur."

"I'm sorry, do I know you?"

"Oh, sorry, I'm with Nextfest."

"Ah."

"Just wanted to let you know - it turns out that the exhibitors aren't going to be here on Tuesday, like we thought, so you don't need to show up until 10 a.m." (I was originally scheduled to report at 7:50 in the morning.)

"Oh. Well, that's good."

"Yeah, isn't it? And since we're not going to have the stuff for you to do that we originally signed you up for, we're going to send you guys out to the Loop instead, to pass out flyers and generate a little buzz about the fest."

Uh-oh. Whenever I hear the words "flyer," "sidewalk" and "buzz" in one sentence, I know the result is never going to be good; think of all those annoying goddamn teens, for example, who flood the sidewalks of big cities every summer, passing out Fruitopia and trying to get you to sign a petition to save the rainforest or whatever.

"Uh..."

"Is there a problem? I know you weren't supposed to do this - you don't have to show up for your shift tomorrow if you don't want."

"Um...no, no. I've got the spare time, I might as well come down and help out." And then we work out the details and hang up.

And then thirty seconds later, I have the following thought for the first time (and I'm sure not the last) - what the hell have I exactly gotten myself into here? See, when I heard that Wired magazine was sponsoring a convention here in Chicago, I just assumed that...you know, the staff of Wired magazine would actually be here and running the convention. That was the entire reason I volunteered, after all - so I could hang out with Wired staff members, sneak into industry parties, get the Apple people high, have a one-night-stand with a cutie little PHP developer, etc etc. Everything I've been exposed to so far in the volunteer process, though, has actually pointed to the opposite theory - that this entire thing was in fact farmed out to an outside marketing agency, with Wired's name simply attached to it as a corporate sponsor, and that the magazine's staff in actuality has absolutely nothing to do with what's going on here at Navy Pier this week.

But still, it's never a good thing to make assumptions about a situation - it does make an ass out of you and me, or so my high-school gym teacher told me. So I train it down to Grand this morning and walk the mile from the el station to Navy Pier, in weather that is freakishly hot for Chicago at this time of year. (It's in the 90s here today [30s C], an almost unheard-of event for Chicago in June.) And I finally get to the Nextfest registration booth, wheezing and drenched in sweat.

"Hi," I exclaim, overjoyed at the prospect of being in air-conditioning again. "I'm Jason Pettus, one of your volunteers."

"Volunteers?"

"Yes. Volunteers. Jason Pettus."

"Um..." The woman scans her clipboard. "Where are you from?"

"From? ...Um, Chicago? I'm not sure what you mean."

The other woman at the booth leans over to the one I'm talking to. "He's probably one of the website volunteers."

The woman scans a different clipboard. "Ah, yes, okay, here you are. If you just want to wait here, Eliana will be by soon to get you started."

"Should I...fill something out? I haven't actually registered yet."

"Oh, we don't handle the volunteer stuff."

Okay.... So I sit down and wait for Eliana. And wait. And WAIT. And I keep thinking, "You know, for as emphatic as Eliana was in her email about me showing up on time, she sure doesn't seem to have the same policy herself." And then finally around 10:30 she does show up, and...

Oh my Lord. She's a sorority girl.

Okay, this situation has now become officially bad. When I first signed up to be a volunteer for this thing, I had been picturing in my mind a liason who was a fellow tech geek - you know, some MIssion-living San Franciscan wearing a leather jacket and a beat-up Sleater-Kinney shirt, sporting a Mac tattoo and an iPod she tricked out so that it now runs off Linux. But instead I've got some Nordstrom-wearing MBA graduate living in SoMa (I asked), who's working at Wired because it was either that or Citibank, whose conversation consisted of questions like, "So do you hang out at Navy Pier a lot?" (Yes, Chicagoans, she asked this without a trace of irony.)

And then the rest of the volunteers show up, who I guess had been in the other room or something. And they're all in high school. Jesus. What the hell have I exactly gotten myself into here? And for some strange reason, I'm the only white person in the volunteer group as well - every single one of my fellow volunteers besides me is either black or Asian. An exhibition designed for nerdy white guys, and I'm the only nerdy white guy in attendance? The things at Nextfest I can't explain just keep piling up, on a minute-by-minute basis.

So then Eliana runs us all up to the room where we can store our stuff, which means walking through the middle of the main exhibition hall, so I snapped off some photos as we were walking through and posted them to my other blog, [metafeed]. And things are definitely looking cool, as you can see in the photos - I really am looking forward to the actual fest opening and all the booths being up and working.

So then Eliana takes us back out to the registration table, hands us each a pile of flyers, and says that we're going to head out in a minute or two. And I still haven't actually registered, still haven't received any of the things I'm supposed to get in my compensation package (the general-admission tickets, the ticket to the special Jeff Tweedy concert at the Vic tomorrow, the iPod, etc) - I still haven't even received one of the cheesy Nextfest t-shirts, which you would've assumed that they would've wanted us to wear while passing out flyers. But things are surreal enough as they are - I am in a peer group with a bunch of 16-year-olds, after all, and getting bossed around by a sorority girl younger than me - so I decide to just roll with the punches and see what happens.

So then Eliana walks us back to the entrance of Navy Pier, where we meet up with yet another of the volunteer coordinators - and good Lord, she's a sorority girl too. Cripes almighty. And so then this girl explains that we're to head out in two groups to Michigan Avenue (yes, the same mile journey I made that morning to get to Navy Pier in the first place), and that once we run out of flyers, we can either come back to get our stuff or just head straight home.

"Will there be any food or drinks when we come back?" I ask.

"No, sorry," the second sorority girl distractedly says from behind her retro-'80s sunglasses. "All the concessions at Navy Pier are run separately from the exhibition hall, so we're not able to actually supply any of that stuff." (This is a lie, of course - Eliana walked us right by the Exhibitor Relations room just twenty minutes previous, which was fully stocked with food and drinks. These sorority girls should really coordinate their stories before trying to pull a fast one over their workers.)

Okay, so what do I want to do? Walk a mile back to Michigan Avenue, stand on a sidewalk in 90-degree weather with a bunch of 16-year-olds, and hand out flyers to something most people could care less about (which, by the way, is something I wasn't supposed to do in the first place)? Ah, fuck that, man. So I threw away the flyers instead, got back on the train and came up to Lakeview, where I am now quietly enjoying a large iced cafe mocha, hanging out with fellow Mac-tattoo-sporting slackers, and impressing everyone around me with my little portable fold-out keyboard for my Treo. Can't believe I had to go back to the place I hang out at every day to actually have the experience I was expecting to have down at Nextfest.

Tomorrow should be interesting - I'm scheduled to work a full eight hours, and this time the exhibitors are supposed to finally be here. (And why they had a fully-stocked Exhibitor Relations room today when there were no exhibitors there is beyond me, man.) And then tomorrow night, the big Jeff Tweedy concert...unless Nextfest somehow manages to screw up my free ticket, which at this point I am certainly not putting past them. More tomorrow afternoon - make sure to check in again then!