“Next up is the study results. Director Lowell, I’ve taken the liberty of scheduling a meeting with the study experts, so they can go into this in more detail and answer questions you and Gray may have. But from the synopsis, I think we’re the only conservatorship that has clearly separated civilian cases from criminal cases. We are also the only one that has such a large PCSS department and we handle the majority of IT and Customer Service work.”
“Good work, Annabeth. I appreciate you handling this, and I look forward to the meeting with the experts,” I respond. I hired Annabeth to be an assistant to Director Lowell a few months ago. I’ve been mentoring her for smaller project management jobs and these days I’m only needed for the large or multi-faceted projects. “Now, for the big project you’ve dumped in my lap, Director Lowell.”
“I wouldn’t call planning a party something that’s dumped on anyone, Gray.”
“First of all, a party is a not what I would call this, Director Lowell. I am planning an event for now over 50,000 Psycepts, PCSS, ABQ community, and whoever else you’re going to add at the last minute, because I know you. Well, the date is set, it’s the Saturday two weeks before Vernal Equinox. This allows us to avoid time conflicts with planting season and Equinox celebrations while still having a good chance for decent weather, though in keeping with the time of year, it may be a bit windy.
“The main venue will be the Centro de Convenciones y Festival del Campo in Old Town. This allows us to use the 40,000-person capacity of the Convention Center with additional room at events staged on the adjacent festival grounds. We have food vendors booked as well as a selection of activities for children like bounce houses and face paintings. We also partially booked a traveling fair, by which the ABQ-AC agreed to waive the rental fee for a week which is enough to get the fair to open at our event. As the fair usually stays two weeks at a time, essentially having half-off rent was incentive enough for them to agree to come to town a little earlier than usual.
“With my recommendation, PCSS originally hired Professor Biobaku as the program director for the police Psycepts panels. The plan is the police Psycepts will hold a few Q&A sessions and a couple of panels regarding this. Since we are such a small portion of Psycepts, we are just trying to demystify what we do. When you expanded the invitation to include all Psycept categories, the Psycept Council liked his preliminary programming enough to engage him to handle the entirety of Psycept programs. The upstairs meeting rooms will have various educational or interactive programs and speakers focusing on Psycept history from our various perspectives.
“This will allow Albuquerque community members to interact with us in greater depth. Right now, Psycepts are quite a separate little community within the much larger ABQ and Bosque arena. The event will also have visitors from other regions talking about their experiences mentoring or taking on a Psycept apprentice.
“Speaking of which, ABQ, Bosque, and other SWACon regions will have programs and speakers from the tribes in the conservatorship as well as descendants of the settlers who chose to remain in the GT so many decades ago. Chief Yanaba’s office is handling the other regions participation while you are working with ABQ and Bosque.
“PCSS is filming day-in-the-work life segments of employees that will be broadcast throughout the Convention Center. There will also be a few panels demonstrating and discussing the myriad of services PCSS offers. We have several Psycept and PCSS meet-and-greets planned throughout the day. We’ll have a career service session for local high schools and community colleges. I know that after high school, two years of military service is compulsory for GT citizens. But they’ll be looking for jobs after military service ends or they obtain their degree and we want to provide them with PCSS possibilities. Annabeth is coordinating all the PCSS contributions.”
“Wow, Gray, this all sounds fantastic. SWACon, Bosque, ABQ, and I want to thank you both for planning this. By the way, do we have a title for this yet?”
“Nope, I began calling it the ‘Psycept Shindig’ early on when it was smaller in scope. You may have seen emails, calendars, or document referring to that. I’ll leave it to you and the co-sponsors of the event to come up with a name more inclusive of all that are involved. Maybe you can turn the naming into a contest for PCSS.”
“The event is in five weeks, Gray. When do you want to start advertising it and coming up with marketing material?”
“Annabeth has my initial mock-ups for advertising and marketing. We just need the official name, which she can insert. We’ll display the information on various websites, the banners have already been coded, just waiting on the name. Flyers will be posted in strategic community areas, like libraries and civic centers and the PCSS workplace. We have some basic script to be used for radio promotion and we’ll film some short videos to embed on social media. You, Professor Biobaku, a Bosque representative, and two members of the Albuquerque Area Council are scheduled to give television, online news, and journalist interviews that will be published two weeks prior or aired the week leading up to the event. All the details are uploaded in the shared site and Annabeth has them as well, as she is overseeing this aspect too.”
“Why are we charging ten dollars for attendance, Gray? This event is costing several million dollars. Math was never my best subject but that small a fee won’t recoup much of our money, might as well just waive it.”
“The attendance fee is more to discourage too many people from coming. Events like this are usually complimentary in SWACon. But we have limited space so even charging such a small amount separates people who want
