The true beginning of my story is sometime back in October but if I wrote this out play by play and word for word it would be insanely long and I would probably have to be standing behind you with a stick to get you to read the entire thing. So I'll paraphrase, cut corners, leave out the vital parts and just try to move things right along in an semi-orderly fashion.
As I was saying, last October, I says to the boss, "Hey Boss, ConNooga is coming up in Feb. we should get booth, take all our damaged merchandise and sell it there for super cheap. The boss, being the business minded creature he is, shocked the hell out of me and said "OK"
Kind of a let down huh? All he said was ok, once you get to know him that simple 2 letter mangling of a word means alot because The Boss is not prone to long speeches, or even short speeches. I.E. He don't talk alot most days.
Anyways, Christmas hit and ConNooga was thrust to the back burner by game crazed customers and enough orders to wrap a BMW in (I'm assuming on that, as none of us own a BMW)
Christmas comes and goes and ConNooga pops its cute little sci-fi head up again and we start getting ready. It was about this time that The Boss decides to speak again and what he says has a rather profound and scary effect on me. He said, "Since it was your idea, Your in charge."
Teach me to open my mouth again won't it.
We get everything in readiness and off we go, into the wild. The land of Role play and Fandom Girls, Star Wars meets Star trek while watching Family Guy and rolling a 20 sided die to see who has to call and order the next pizza while shouting for mom to bring more Mt. Dew to the basement door.
We arrive and set up our booth (with a few minor complications) and amazingly we sell our first item before we even have the booth complete. I'm not sure the sale counts though, as it was to the ladies in the next booth selling Browncoat merchandise.
For the Record, those ladies and the S2P/Pinnacle booth across from us and the fairy wings booth on our other side were all very very cool people who did everything they could to help me out when I was in need. I hope The Boss lets us go back and I hope that they are the booths surrounding us again next year.
Things progress and we sell a few items but the first night of a con is usually slow for vendors. so we spent our time watching people dressed as anime characters and Jedi walk around and I took to asking passersby's if they wanted to buy a Giraffe. This may seem odd but one of the items we had brought with us was a 100 dollar 5 ft tall plush Giraffe. If nothing else it got people to stop walking because come on ... how often does someone ask you if you want to buy a Giraffe?
If you look close you can see the giraffe I was speaking of, the shelves we put everything on are 6ft so the Giraffe is slightly taller than 5 ft. The bloke on the computer is my colleague Noah. He is the resident IT wizard where I work ... kinda makes sense because he is messing with the laptop in the pic ... Go Figure!
As a random statement, This was Noah's first and after this adventure, most likely his last convention.
(That was foreshadowing ... kinda ominous and mysterious wasn't it)
We closed up shop and headed for our room, The wife had called as soon as she got off work and informed me that she was on her way. We head up front to collect her and get everything unloaded in the room. Then we proceeded to wander around talking to people, socializing, meeting people and randomly asking if anyone wanted to buy a Giraffe, Of course, no one did.
Around 10 we found a room party that had not yet begun but the doors were open, so we wandered in and offered to help finish setting up if we could score a drink. We helped them set up for awhile, took our drinks and began to wander again.
Around 11:30 we came upon a group standing in a hallway waiting for the doors to open for a different room party, they all seemed in good spirits and we could tell that they had already begun partying several hours before.
As we were standing talking to them, one of the group stumbles into me. I don't know if he was pushed or lost his balance or what, but the end result was that he stumbled into me, knocking me down, he then fell on top of me. We got all untangled and sorted out and I realized that my leg felt like it was on fire. I could put no weight on it, couldn't even touch it. They (the guy that fell on me and a gentleman named Ryan Buckley who does interviews for http://www.infernaldreams.net) carried me back to the hotel room and I got The Wife to get me some ice to put on it. I thought maybe it was just really bruised and letting it sit the rest of the night with ice on it would make it good enough for me to still work the booth.
I woke up the next morning and could not feel my toes. Waking the wife up I made the ever dreadful decision to go to the E.R.
There I was told I had broken my shin in 2 places. They shot me up with Morphine, which didn't seem to help at all when they set my leg. The doctor that set the bone seemed very unhappy or pissed off or something, after he got through POUNDING on my leg to set the bone, I asked him if I had done something to piss him off. He, of course, said no, wrapped it in a toes to mid-thigh cast that probably weighed around 10lbs. and sent me on my way.
The Wife had gone home while I was in the E.R. to get crutches we had there and to make sure the kids were OK, she was still not back when they OK'd me to leave, so I called our warehouse manager to come save the day. He showed up and drove me back to the convention and carried me to our booth so I could continue to harass con goers as they walked by, only now I was saying things like, "My leg will feel better if you buy a giraffe!"
I never sold that stupid Giraffe but we did manage to make over 1,500 dollars which I think is excellent for our first attempt at having a convention booth and considering what all happened.
I want to point out that I probably would not have made it the entire weekend without the organizers of ConNooga and the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel staff doing everything they could to help me. They were very cool and they even found me a wheelchair to roll around in for the rest of my stay at the hotel.
And I also would not have made it without the help and donated pain medicine from the various people I met and talked to through-out the convention. We didn't realize there was a 24 hour pharmacy in Chattanooga and The wife got back too late on Sat afternoon to get my script filled, so when word got out what had happened and that I didn't have any pain meds people were coming by the booth to offer me pain killers and one girl actually offered to share some of her dope with me. I haven't smoked that since high school so I politely declined but I still thought it was a very kind offer.
The very best was when a hotel staffer came up while I was rolling around getting people to sign my cast and gave me a half full bottle of Crown Royal. Seems our waiter from dinner Friday night had talked to some of his co-workers and they managed to scrounge up the bottle from someones late night stash. I'm still using the purple bag as a sort of alcoholic man-purse to carry my stuff in as I fumble about on crutches.
It's not exactly the fame I would wish upon someone but by the end of ConNooga, I was a semi-celebrity, I even got interviewed by Mr. Ryan Buckley for his website.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgBrfvGeJYM
My part starts around the 58 second mark.
One last thing of note for the weekend, the Con Chairman asked if I would try to hang on to the cast so they could put it in the Charity auction next year. After all ... Every Sig on it was from someone at the convention or someone who worked for the hotel.
Stay Tuned for part 2 of My Adventure ... to be written as soon as I feel like writing again.
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