BCCC 2019!

It's time to go back in time, y'all! I want to go back one month to Bell County Comic Con.

Bell County Comic Con (BCCC) has become our summer tradition. My husband and I are on staff so we finish the school year and immediately get ready for BCCC. It can be incredibly stressful but I love it so much. The best part is all of the wonderful people who work as staff and as volunteers.

This year was a little difficult because I am in charge of registration but I had to work during pre-registration. I really wish that there could have been a way for me to be in two places at once. However, again, I have wonderful people that I work with and they were able to work pre-registration. I thought that things were going to be as smooth as last year when the doors opened on Saturday but boy was I wrong! I had about 6 people volunteering at registration and we had over 20,000 people enter the event in the first hour! Now, not all of them came through registration but it sure felt like they did! It was odd how it was just a trickle at first but then we were SLAMMED.

Doors opened at 10am and by 11am I had a full-blown panic attack. (This photo was taken after doors opened but before the deluge of attendees) I had a few saving graces: almost all of the staff showed up to help out. They left their jobs to help me and I cannot thank them enough. (Extra thanks to Johnny and Pedro who gave me much needed hugs) Also, my volunteers totally took everything in stride. They were working as a team and helping each other out. Finally, my new friend Stephanie literally held my hand through it. I told her what was happening and she got me to go over to the first aid area (which was just a few yards away from me) so that I could gather myself. The wonderful medics got me water and went back to registration to get me my medicine. It was really helpful to have an area with much fewer people. It was still noisy but I wasn't feeling like I was being trampled. Stephanie then went the extra mile and bought me a mini-cheesecake. She had to basically force me to eat it but I'm very grateful she did. I was being stubborn and I needed someone just as stubborn to tell me to take care of myself.

By 1pm, the crowd had died down quite a bit and my volunteers were able to take a lunch break. The rest of the day went pretty smoothly. I didn't have time to enjoy the convention but that's ok. I'm really proud that I was able to help some people who started their conversation with me irate but left me excited to enter the convention. My trick? Use psychology. The problem I met with the most was people who had not bought enough tickets. They were upset that they now needed to buy more and it would be at full price instead of at the discount they got by buying early. So I pulled up the cost of a full-price ticket and told them it but I knew of some discounts so I then applied the discount and told them their new total. Everyone feels good getting a discount, even if it's not as big of a discount as what they wanted.

The best part of my Saturday was meeting Bumblebee! I had asked her weeks before the con to stop by registration if she had the chance. Sure enough, she remembered my request and took time out of her day to say hi to ME. It made a very crappy day about one million times better.

Sunday is always a much easier day for registration since a majority of our attendees buy weekend passes. They pick up their badge on Saturday so Sunday they don't stop by registration; they just walk in. I was able to walk the whole convention with my friend, Brianna and I even got to chat with my bestie, Jo. It is such an awesome feeling to see what we all worked so hard to complete come together. I also loved that near the end of the day I got to meet a member of an online community I cherish, the FoEs (Fans of Epbot). Side note: if you don't read Epbot, you really should check it out.

You want to know the best part of the whole dang thing? At the end, staff decided to have "closing ceremonies" which was emceed by my spouse. He started his speech by thanking everyone. I missed the very beginning but it went like this:

My husband told a huge crowd that he loves me. ❤️ It was followed by a video recap of the convention. Unfortunately I cannot embed the video but you can find it on the Bell County Comic Con Facebook page.

Sunday evening breakdown started and I hope a new tradition started: everyone told the best part of the con and the weirdest part. It was a great time to tell stories of people paying celebrities to hit them with a metal folding chair, finding underwear and no owner, and having a dance-off with a celebrity.

A week later we had an awesome volunteer party at SpareTime. It has bowling, laser tag, and video games. I'm going to end this post with some photos from that party. It was even better than it looks!

-Clare G. S.