The agents are running check-in again (and what broke last time)

Check-in, badge printing, and the wayfinding kiosks are agent-run again this year. Registration desk humans are present, and their job is the interesting cases rather than the queue.

Since we are asking you to trust the thing, here is what went wrong last time.

What worked

Ninety-four percent of arrivals went from door to badge without speaking to anyone. Median time was under forty seconds. Nobody stood in a line long enough to get annoyed about it.

What did not

The remaining six percent clustered into three failure modes, and only one of them was interesting:

• Name mismatches between the ticket and the ID — mostly people who registered through an employer. Boring, expected, handled by a human in about a minute.
• Late transfers. Tickets reassigned within an hour of arrival were not always reflected at the kiosk. That one was ours, and it is fixed.
• The genuinely interesting one: the agent kept confidently routing people to a room that had been repurposed the night before. It had no way to know. It does now — room changes propagate to wayfinding within thirty seconds.

We would rather publish this than let you discover it at the door.