Comic Con: Quick Hits

Some Comic Con stories just aren't very long.

The Time I Lost My Car

Parking is hard to find, because Comic Con is right by downtown San Diego. It used to be right in the middle of downtown when it was at the "old" convention center, instead of the current, showy "new" convention center.

Once, when it was at the old place, I spent the twenty bucks to park onsite, which had one of those spiral parking lots where you drive up in a continual curve and eventually park. I parked at around floor five and went about my fun-having. That night, Rufus and I went to get my car, and it was gone.

I wasn't sure exactly which level I'd stopped at, so we walked up the parking lot one level. Nothing. We walked down. Nothing. We walked up to the roof. Nothing. We walked all the way down to the street level. Nothing. My car was not in evidence.

We found some other ride and came back the next day. We took the elevator to level four, and there was my car, right in front of the elevator. We were, naturally, dumbfounded. Had someone stolen my car and then brought it back? Why would car thieves bring a car back to the place they took it from? And why would car thieves spend twenty dollars to park a car? Or had my car vanished for several hours like in the Philadelphia Experiment? It was baffling.

Eventually, we discovered that the parking lot was a double helix (get us; we're Watson and Crick!). If you go in through Entrance A, you'll be on Level 1, and when you've completed one loop of the spiral, you'll be on Level 3, and so on through the odd-numbered levels. If you go in through Entrance B, you'll be on even-numbered levels. And if you're on, say, Level 5, and you're looking for a car that's on Level 4, you'll never find it.

The Time I Quite My Job To Go

I had this terrible job where I was an "Inventory Specialist". I'd meet all the other Specialists in the middle of the night, and we'd all get in a van to be taken to a Home Depot or something. And we'd count screws for eight hours. The ten-key unit we wore slung around our waists was pretty cool, but it didn't make up for the general badness of the job.

After I'd been there for about three weeks (and was inching my way up the "Ten-Key Speed" ladder on the wall), I asked for four days off to go to Comic Con. They said no. I said please. They said no. I mentioned that I'd told them about this when I was hired. They said no. So I waited until the day before the Con, and then I quit. Take that, terrible job.

The Bullwinkle and Rocky RPG Party Game

Comic Con promises 24-hour gaming rooms, and I used to make it my sworn duty to make sure that there was all-night gaming. One night in the late-night gaming room in the Hotel San Diego (motto: "Now with fewer cockroaches!"), we'd played everything. We'd played Illuminati for hours, we'd played Grass, we'd played Naval War, we'd played Family Business, we were basically just exhausted with all the cutthroat gaming and backstabbing.

So I busted out the Bullwinkle and Rocky RPG Party Game, which I'd won earlier that day at the TSR booth. It remains the only time I've played this game, because it's very hard to get people to play a game that involves hand puppets. Even hardcore gamers have trouble staying in character when faced with a Bullwinkle puppet capering in front of them. But everyone's resistance was beaten down, and they all agreed to play. Even the homeless guy we found sleeping under a table played.

He was good, too. I shall always treasure the memory of that guy with a Sherman hand puppet saying "Gee, Mr. Peabody!" in a shaky falsetto.