Rubicon 2002 Wrapup
April 2002: Here are all of my pictures from Rubicon 4. You’ll have to excuse the blurriness of some of the pictures since I have a crappy digital camera. This year I managed to drag along 4 other people with me to Rubicon – EvilCal (who actually drove up from southern Texas just to go), isotek (known as Wraith in the pictures from last year), Green God (a friend of mine from the St. Louis 2600 meetings) and Adrenaline (another from the 2600 meetings).
Me and EvilCal drove to St. Louis on Thursday afternoon to pick up isotek, green god and adrenaline and brought them back to my house. The next morning we wake up at about 5:00 AM, pack everything into EvilCal’s car and we’re on Interstate 55 by 6:00 AM. We only make a few stops and we end up at Rubicon at about 3:00 PM.
 |
 |
| Ladymace decides that this annoying, drunk 14-year-old kid who goes by Spike needs to be shut up by hog tying him up with duct tape. Evilcal puts his arms on the kid’s shoulder, inviting him to our room for a party. | Here you see Spike sitting on our bed, just seconds before he notices all the people looking at him and exclaims, “Hey, what’s going on here??” |
 |
 |
| Spike’s questions are answered when several people jump on top of him and begin to tie his legs and hands with duct tape. | He breaks free from the duct tape. So handcuffs are used which are reinforced with more duct tape. That holds him. He eventually escapes but for the rest of the con he’s a little quieter than before. |
 |
 |
| Here’s the Rubicon sticker car. It had an empty spot on it so I felt it was my civic duty to slap a yellow Phone Losers sticker on it. | Some of you might remember Tunak Tunak by Daler Mehndi (that weird indian-sounding song) being played nonstop on FRS channel #12 all weekend during the con. Here’s our ultra-elite broadcasting setup – an FRS base station sitting next to my laptop. |
 |
 |
| Since the con was rather tame, compared to previous cons, we decided we HAD to do something. So the best we could come up with was to stack all of our hotel room’s furniture as high as possible against one wall. Here’s a table. With 2 chairs on it. And a lamp. Aren’t we cool? | And here’s Green God, trapped behind our creation. We could have done this a lot better. At least we weren’t destructive, just annoying. |
 |
 |
| A couple of quick pictures before we leave our room for good. | Before we left we turned on the shower’s hot water. As we were leaving the hotel (30 minutes later) we opened up the door to our room and peeked in and you could barely see or breathe because of all the steam in the room. Bet the maids loved us for that. |
 |
 |
| As usual, RijilV is always happy to see me. | Around the end of the con, some hotel lady asked Jim Tantalo if she could have a word with him in private. Here’s a picture I snapped just as she was angrily saying, “In all my years of working at this hotel I have NEVER seen this amount of damage and you will be held responsible for all of it!” |
 |
 |
| As we were leaving the con, we noticed some guy wearing a PLA t-shirt so we started interrogating him about where he got it. He easily broke down crying after just a few minutes. | 2 of the pay phones survived, 1 of them didn’t. Notice the handset ripped off of the first phone. |
 |
 |
| Returning our Items of Destruction back to Krogers. We had bought a few items from Krogers on Saturday night, hoping to cause a little confusion at the con since it was turning out to be boring as hell. But when we got back to the hotel later, things were heating up with the hotel staff and police being there. So we decided doing bad things wouldn’t be a good idea. | A hotel manager eyes everyone suspiciously on Sunday morning. This is the same lady who was lecturing Jim just an hour earlier. |
 |
 |
| As we were leaving the hotel for good, we noticed a door with caution tape and a sign from the Romulus Police Department warning people to stay out of that stairwell. I assume that this is the stairwell that fire extinguishers went off in. | Isotek walks back to the car, excited about going to Cereal City next. |
We left the Marriott at about 10:00 AM and decided to make a stop at Cereal City in Battle Creek, Michigan which was about 2 hours away. EvilCal really wanted to stop there on the way to Rubicon but I refused to pull the car over. As much as none of us really wanted to go, EvilCal won and we stopped there just for him. He was even nice enough to pay for all of our tickets to tour the factory and everyone ended up having an excellent time there. In fact, I think that we all agreed that Cereal City was much cooler than Rubicon. Next year we might just skip Rubicon and spend our weekend at Cereal City instead, saving 4 hours of driving time. Maybe we can talk to the Rubicon staff about holding Rubicon at Cereal City next year.
 |
 |
| Kellog’s Cereal City in Battle Creek, MI | Look at the pretty cereal boxes stacked everywhere! |
 |
 |
| isotek, greengod and adrenaline testing out their hacking skills at Cereal City. | Adrenaline is mesmorized by the cereal moving around when he spins the wheel. |
 |
 |
| Redboxchilipepper | EvilCal |
 |
 |
| Adrenaline | Green God |
 |
 |
| isotek | It was a hard day at Cereal City – Green God and Adrenaline get some rest on the way back home to St. Louis. |
We left Cereal City around noon and drove back to St. Louis. We ended up making a lot of stops on the way back so we didn’t get home until about 9:00 PM that night.
6/24/2002 update: Okay, this is weird. A little over 2 months has passed since Rubicon. When I reserved my room for Rubicon I used my PayPal Mastercard. I did this because I knew there was the smallposibility that we would cause damage in our room and since my PayPal account averages around $3.00 on a good day they wouldn’t be able to bill my credit card for the damages. Good call on my part. A week or 2 after Rubicon, the Marriott tried to charge my PayPal card for about $14.00 or so. It was for the bottled water that we opened and the internet access that we didn’t pay for on the 2nd day. Instead of checking out and paying for it, we just left. We didn’t think it was fair to charge us $4.00 for the water because the sign said, “Your room will be charged $4.00 if you consume this water.” Well we didn’t consume the water, we just poured it’s contents onto the floor. Major difference there. Anyway, here’s the weird part…
This weekend I get something in the mail from the Romulus Marriott. I figure it’s a bill for the $14.00 I owe them. I think “Neat, I’ll stuff some of my daughter’s play money in it and send it back to them.” But I open it up and it’s a check for $9.15.
Attached to the check was a perferated section like you’d get with a paycheck. On that it says it’s a credit because I overpaid. And it’s definitely from the Romulus Marriott. See below:
So is this some kind of evil trick? Are they trying to get me to deposit this check into my bank account so they’ll get my bank account number? Is it an honest mistake where they initially charged us an extra $9.15 when we paid almost $200 for the room? Should I burn the check? Should I wipe my butt with it and send it back? If they really owed me $9.15 why didn’t they take it out of my $14.00?? Should just deposit the damn thing and quit being paranoid? I know I’m just going to lose weeks of sleep over this.