shfss shshss
Dec. 9th, 2025 02:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davemerrillso this is my last year managing the Super Happy Fun Sell. The SHFS is AWA's garage sale/yard sale/used anime merch/swap meet sort of event, we sell tables to fans who want to unload their unwanted anime and manga and etc.
I honestly can't remember the first year we had it. I know AWA had been trying to find new events to fill up Thursday night to try and get people to show up early and get their badges so as to relieve the Friday lineups. I'd been doing some Thursday night panels before then.
Some of the other conventions had been doing swap meet type things, I know we weren't the first. It's my recollection that Lloyd - one of the other AWA founders - actually said "let's do this" and I think he came up with the "Super Happy Fun Sell" name, which is a play on the old Saturday Night Live fake commercial about Happy Fun Ball, Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball.
Anyway I heard about it, and was immediately like, "this is a great idea, I wanna run it" and there we were. And that was at least twenty years ago. I'm glad I ran it because I got first crack at the weird old merchandise people didn't want any more, and because I got to sell my own unwanted merch at my own table, which I did not pay for, because Staff Hath Its Privileges.
Also, it's an event people love, people love the vibe, people love bargains, people love cleaning out their closets and making a little scratch. Putting smiles on faces is the best thing.
So, if I love it so much, why am I stepping away? Well, this kind of event that involves registrations and table layouts and conversations about lines and scheduling, that event really needs someone in Atlanta who can go to staff meetings and really be involved in the planning and make sure the event is integrated well with the rest of the schedule. And that person is not me, I don't live in Atlanta any more and I don't have the, shall we say, the spoons to keep up with this event long-distance, alongside all the other things that demand my attention throughout the year.
Don't get me wrong, things usually turn out OK, but that's because I'm on site hours in advance, making sure all the tables are where they need to be (if not, I gotta find somebody to fix it), someone's controlling the lines (if not, I gotta find staffers to do line control), someone else found the event signage (if not, I gotta find someone who knows where the signage is), and making sure somebody else is moving all the tech equipment out of the room because there's usually tech equipment sitting around in the room when I get there. There's always someone I need to find, and I don't know where to find them or how to find them or who they are, because, again, I haven't been to staff meetings in twenty solid years.
Usually there is someone on staff or staff-related who was promised a table by somebody else on staff, and that information never gets to me until the day of the show, at which point I usually don't have any tables left. Somebody in Atlanta would probably get that memo.
When you add this kind of thing on top of the pile of things that already need to get done for the SHFS - sending out confirmation emails, printing maps, answering the same fifty questions every single year about "what is a used item" and "can I sell my own artwork or plushies or keychains that I made" and other already-answered questions, well, it gets kind of overwhelming. And overwhelming is not a thing I need, particularly at a convention which by its very nature already has me amped up and on edge, at a time of year when I'm also amped up and on edge, and also have a ton of other things to do that are grabbing more and more of my bandwidth.
So, I'm not gonna do it any more. I still intend to show up and try to get in there early to grab the weird old cool stuff, but I'm sure AWA has staffers that can take over and run the event perfectly well.
I honestly can't remember the first year we had it. I know AWA had been trying to find new events to fill up Thursday night to try and get people to show up early and get their badges so as to relieve the Friday lineups. I'd been doing some Thursday night panels before then.
Some of the other conventions had been doing swap meet type things, I know we weren't the first. It's my recollection that Lloyd - one of the other AWA founders - actually said "let's do this" and I think he came up with the "Super Happy Fun Sell" name, which is a play on the old Saturday Night Live fake commercial about Happy Fun Ball, Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball.
Anyway I heard about it, and was immediately like, "this is a great idea, I wanna run it" and there we were. And that was at least twenty years ago. I'm glad I ran it because I got first crack at the weird old merchandise people didn't want any more, and because I got to sell my own unwanted merch at my own table, which I did not pay for, because Staff Hath Its Privileges.
Also, it's an event people love, people love the vibe, people love bargains, people love cleaning out their closets and making a little scratch. Putting smiles on faces is the best thing.
So, if I love it so much, why am I stepping away? Well, this kind of event that involves registrations and table layouts and conversations about lines and scheduling, that event really needs someone in Atlanta who can go to staff meetings and really be involved in the planning and make sure the event is integrated well with the rest of the schedule. And that person is not me, I don't live in Atlanta any more and I don't have the, shall we say, the spoons to keep up with this event long-distance, alongside all the other things that demand my attention throughout the year.
Don't get me wrong, things usually turn out OK, but that's because I'm on site hours in advance, making sure all the tables are where they need to be (if not, I gotta find somebody to fix it), someone's controlling the lines (if not, I gotta find staffers to do line control), someone else found the event signage (if not, I gotta find someone who knows where the signage is), and making sure somebody else is moving all the tech equipment out of the room because there's usually tech equipment sitting around in the room when I get there. There's always someone I need to find, and I don't know where to find them or how to find them or who they are, because, again, I haven't been to staff meetings in twenty solid years.
Usually there is someone on staff or staff-related who was promised a table by somebody else on staff, and that information never gets to me until the day of the show, at which point I usually don't have any tables left. Somebody in Atlanta would probably get that memo.
When you add this kind of thing on top of the pile of things that already need to get done for the SHFS - sending out confirmation emails, printing maps, answering the same fifty questions every single year about "what is a used item" and "can I sell my own artwork or plushies or keychains that I made" and other already-answered questions, well, it gets kind of overwhelming. And overwhelming is not a thing I need, particularly at a convention which by its very nature already has me amped up and on edge, at a time of year when I'm also amped up and on edge, and also have a ton of other things to do that are grabbing more and more of my bandwidth.
So, I'm not gonna do it any more. I still intend to show up and try to get in there early to grab the weird old cool stuff, but I'm sure AWA has staffers that can take over and run the event perfectly well.
