At World Fantasy Con this past weekend Howard Tayler lent a hand to assure someone got the medical attention they needed.

I was engaged in a late-night conversation in the lobby bar when one of the bikers with whom we shared the hotel approached our group.

“You guys, man… you guys gotta take better care of your own.”

“I’m sorry, what’s wrong?” I was puzzled. He seemed frustrated and worried.

“One of your girls, she’s sick drunk outside. She needs her friends to care of her.”

Tayler checked on the person, found she was slumped over and couldn’t be wakened, then went and alerted the hotel staff who promptly sent security to take care of the situation. An even worse ending was avoided.

As Tayler says, “All I did was take ownership of the problem for just long enough to hand it off to the folks who knew how to solve it,” but he calls on anyone who encounters such a situation to do the same in his blog post  “They Know What To Do But You Have To Tell Them”. (“They” meaning hotel security.)

Incidentally, the bikers sharing the hotel with World Fantasy Con were part of the Rolling Thunder Run, which keeps alive the memory of service members left behind after the Vietnam War and “strives to affect national policy in a way that will assist POW/MIA’s.” WFC co-chair Michael J. Walsh says “WFC and Rolling Thunder got along quite well.”