It wasn’t all fun and games working for an RPG manufacturer in Northern California. Some days we had to do real, actual work…like acting as party hosts and cruise directors for visiting people or being flown out to trade shows and retail open houses to represent the Chessex brand name in person. This became known around the offices as “The Mark and Weldon Show.”
Both Weldon and myself were no strangers to conventions and business conferences, and we are likewise not scared of crowds, public speaking, or playing host. And we were working in an industry not exactly well known for its collective savoir faire, if you know what I mean and I think you do. That meant we were usually conscripted to run a booth, talk to retailers, or otherwise glad-hand and schmooze whomever needed glad-handing and schmoozing.
One of the nice things that Chessex did for its customers was throw an annual Open House event. It was scheduled Post-GAMA, so everyone had heard of the new products coming out. Each regional retail warehouse would throw open its doors and invite all of their clients to come see the place, look at how we did things, and even buy stuff if you wanted. Local publishers and manufacturers would have a table or two set up so they could speak directly to customers and showcase their upcoming wares.
The manager for the Midwest warehouse (who’s name escapes me) had perfected the art of grilling steaks, so the meal for the open house was steak, baked potatoes, corn, etc. And the steaks were really good. People ate, shopped, shook hands, and then went home. It was a nice little one-day rah rah fest. Chessex manufacturing was obligated to be at all of them.
Initially, the open house trip, which included plane fare and a hotel stay, was treated as a kind of in-house perk, an ‘attaboy’ for a good job, or somesuch. We heard a lot about being ‘fair,’ so that everyone got a chance to eat grilled steak in a warehouse, surrounded by wargames on metal shelves. But by the end of our time there, it was just assumed that we’d be going, along with whomever else needed to be there. No one complained about it, either. We had our shtick down pat by then. Besides, anyone who’s ever manned a table at a sales conference knows that plane fare and a hotel room aren’t nearly enough to offset the amount of work that goes into being at such a place.
Our main job was to rep our line of quality products and, well, just kinda be ourselves: chatty, entertaining, fun-to-be-around, etc. We never gave any presentations or anything like that, but we did stick around for the after-hours gaming and the adult beverage consumption that followed such an august soiree.
One thing about these Open Houses: while we were happily demonstrating new products and chatting up older items with the various retailers who showed up, we were really in charge of selling to our fellow Chessex employees, who would better represent us to their clientele if they remembered what swell guys we were. Sometimes this meant a little harmless bribery, like buying some beer and bringing it to the warehouse. Other times, it meant just showing people a good time; it was a case-by-case basis, and no two episodes of the Mark and Weldon show were the same.
My first Chessex Open House was at Chessex Midwest, in Fort Wayne, Indiana—not exactly known for night life and culture. Don’t google the city name and the word “controversy.” Trust me. Aside from that, the Midwest warehouse was the largest and busiest in the Chessex family, as they serviced the entire Midwest, including a few large hobby store chains. It wasn’t the first Open House I’d been to, but it was the first one I was to be working at.
We didn’t get much of a chance to really work our magic on the cheese-eating, dice-rolling, game playing population of Fort Wayne. They were a well-oiled machine. However, at Chessex East, they were a little more loosey goosey, and they were subsequently down to clown. We kept some of the warehouse staff up well past the festivities’ end by telling them stories of our various exploits, including the saga of moving from Austin to Berkeley in a 17-foot-long U-Haul filled to the brim with 21 feet worth of stuff. One of the warehouse guys (I think his name was Jeremy) laughed himself sober listening to us tag team the story of how we got stuck in the mountain range outside of L.A. We made it back to our hotel and crashed, well after midnight, quite pleased with ourselves.
The ‘One Damn Thing’ Rule of Real Estate
A brief digression: we moved into a new apartment a few months after I got to town. Our new place was in El Cerrito, two BART stops away from Berkeley, so we were still pretty much in the thick of the East Bay. We moved into the place over the weekend, which wasn’t so bad, since most of the big stuff we brought from Texas was in a storage unit already.
Our new place had two bedrooms and only one bath. It was located in the hall, between the living area and Weldon’s bedroom. My bedroom was directly off of the living area. I mention this because, since we had to share a bathroom, it was determined that Weldon would get first use of it, since he took longer. His hair, for God’s sake, was a massive mane of curls and it required time and product to bring to heel. Also, Weldon doesn’t shower so much as he schvitzes, okay? I was quite used to watching the bathroom door open after Weldon was through with his morning ablutions and a cloud of steam came rolling out in a grand rush.
I got fifteen extra minutes of sleep, and the bathroom was nice and warm. It was a win-win. Until we moved to the apartment in El Cerrito.
Our first day of work at the new place, I was awakened by the smoke alarm going off. I ran drunkenly out of my room to find Weldon in his skivvies, attempting to fan the steam away from the smoke alarm that was mounted directly opposite the bathroom door in the hallway. I stood there, bleary-eyed, still groggy, but flooded with adrenaline, as he finally managed to get the steam away from the unit and it stopped making the horrible shrieking sound.
I was a little upset. I know he didn’t do it on purpose, but I was still addled with sleep. “What the fuck were you doing?”
Weldon was torn between being sorry he set the alarm off and pissed that they put it in the hallway. “Showering!” he said. “I didn’t know,” he sputtered. “Why would they DO that? Who puts smoke alarms right there?”
I muttered, “Well, that’s not going to get old.”
That’s the “One Damn Thing” rule of Real Estate. No mater if you’re renting or buying, there’s always going to be One Damn Thing you didn’t think to ask about or check out, because why would you? It’s never been a problem before. But now that you have noticed it, you’ll always check out subsequent places for that potential problem. You’ll check it out in your new place, and count yourself lucky that the same problem isn’t here. However, as soon as you move in, you’ll discover a separate, totally different and equally random problem that you hadn’t thought to look for, because why would you?
In our case, we didn’t think that we needed to check the proximity of the smoke alarm to the bathroom door, but there it was. Weldon set off the smoke alarm at least once a week after that. So often, in fact, that we developed a system. We kept box lids outside the door so that if the alarm went off, we could use the lids to quickly fan the steam away and quiet the smoke detector. It became very routine, almost matter-of-fact. I’d hear the alarm go off, and I’d get up with my eyes still closed, shuffle walk into the living room, grab a box lid, and help Weldon disperse the steam. He’d say “Sorry,” and I’d grunt and walk into the still-steamy bathroom for my morning whiz. Aaaaand scene.
I told you that to tell you this:
We’re at the Chessex East Open House. We’re dead asleep in Malvern, Pennsylvania. It’s 3:23 AM—truly the middle of the night. And we hear the smoke alarm go off in our room. Oh God, it’s so loud. We’re both jolted into a state of unsleep, neither awake nor dreaming.
I don’t move. “Turn it off!” I moan. After all, this is Weldon’s fault. He always sets off the smoke alarm.
The loud, shrieking device in question was mounted high on the wall opposite me, above Weldon’s bed. We both knew this because the red light was blinking in the darkness, so we knew exactly where the god-awful cacophony was coming from.
Weldon gets up—standing in the bed in his undies, and starts fanning the smoke alarm with his pillow.
“It won’t stop!” he yells.
“KILL IT!” I scream. “Turn it OFF!”
Weldon jumped up, and after a couple of tries, managed to hit the reset switch on the outside of the smoke detector, and it fell silent. He literally collapsed back into the bed, falling down like his strings had been cut. I rolled over and faced the wall and we went back to sleep.
The next morning, we’d forgotten all about it, more or less. We showered, got dressed, headed down to meet the rest of our group, and the first thing they asked us was, “Where were YOU last night?”
We recounted our movements leading up to us falling asleep, and they said, “No, last night, when the fire alarm went off?”
“What fire alarm?” we asked.
“You didn’t hear it? There was a fire in the kitchen.”
“Well, yeah, we heard it, but we just…” We looked at each other and the realization that we could have died in a fire wiped us out. We laughed about it for the rest of the day. We tried to explain it to our group, but they just looked at us like we were insane. “That’s not funny!” one of them said.
“It’s hysterical,” we assured them, but they remained unconvinced.
Office Shenanigans
We tried to have fun at work whenever we could. This included spearheading a couple of dinners, and a few inter-office activities. For example, we decided to dress up as super heroes for Halloween—make your own or pick a favorite. So, we did. I came as the Golden Age Sandman. Weldon had a western-themed hero named Lariat. Our graphic artist, Dave, went as SuperFresh, a home-made, idealized version of himself, which would have been fine, except that the night before, Dave and his friends went to the Stinking Rose, a restaurant known for its aggressive use of garlic in everything they made, including ice cream. Dave ate a 16-clove chicken and, I dunno, something else, but the amount of garlic he consumed was way more than the human body can process, so, it started coming out of him. He was literally sweating garlic. And you could smell him from ten feet away. I love garlic, but not on that day.
We would often gather up a few folks to go with us, because there was a sandwich shop a couple of blocks away, run by an Armenian man named Albie. He made great sandwiches, soups, etc, you know the drill; nothing fancy, just good. He had an egg salad sandwich with bacon on it that was the bee’s knees. But that’s not why we were regulars.
Albie knew a guy who knew a guy and he stocked Kinder Surprise eggs at his cash register. These were the old school Kinder Surprise eggs, from back in the day when they were illegal to import to the United States because they didn’t want a child to put the capsule or the toy into their mouth and choke to death. Kids in Europe? No problem, folks, Vaya con dios. Apparently, German toddlers were smarter (or maybe just better managed) than American toddlers. The candy, if you don’t know, consisted of a thin double wall of white and milk chocolate, surrounding a plastic yellow capsule, that contained—well, what didn’t they contain? The first Kinder Surprise toy I got was a 1.5 inch long tin soldier, no fooling. A metal Saxon knight. From a little chocolate egg.
Soon all of our desks and computer monitors were liberally festooned with these strange little toys. One of them was a Ferris wheel, for crying out loud. The damn thing, when assembled, was three times the size of the capsule it came out of. Weldon and I brought the eggs home with us for Christmas. We couldn’t get enough of them. And every time we’d pull something new and different out of the capsule, we’d always say, “And all that from a little chocolate egg.”
Cruise Directors
Our party-planning skills were in such demand that other companies began to use us. We shared an office door with Berkeley Game Distributors, another regional game distribution company, and by that I mean, there was a door in our office that we could not open, as it would lead into the offices of BGD. We had to knock on it if we needed to speak to them, and vice versa. It was never a problem, but it was a little weird.
Berkeley Game Distributors was having their own version of an Open House, and they very considerately invited all of us to attend, as well, even though we were cordially not-competing with each other since we were so closely aligned with Chessex Distribution. Regardless. Don and the owner of Berkeley Game Distributors were friends, so we got the invite. And they were feeding their guests, too! They had the hot dog grill all fired up.
Several of the manufacturers in attendance were not especially blown away by the idea of all the grilled hot dogs you could eat. In particular, a large contingent of people from Iron Crown Enterprises was there, and we knew some of them from previous shows and events. They were happy to see us, and we readily decided to spirit them away from the evening’s group dinner to wine and dine them ourselves. We ran it by the Berkeley Game Distributors people, first, so they wouldn’t think we were being jerks, and they fairly jumped at the chance to have us be the cruise directors for their little open house, because they sure as hell didn’t want to do any of it.
We piled twelve people into three cars and took them into downtown Berkeley, to our favorite sushi restaurant, one of those great places with the river and the dragons boats that sail around the bar, and as they float by you just grab whatever you want from the boats. At the end of the night, they count your trays and sort them by color and that’s what you owe. It’s a great restaurant to begin with, but for a group of fun-loving people, it was super cool. One of the women on ICE’s sales team was named Monica and she was something of a firecracker. She bragged that she wasn’t worried about sushi; she loved all of it, had tried everything, it was all so blase to her. Weldon and I decided to test that. We asked the chef for something special, something interesting. That’s what we told him. We didn’t know what to ask for. He cocked his eyebrow and gave us a “are you sure?” look and we nodded vigorously. He got to work. We went back to schmoozing.
When the boat came around, carrying the “special” it was like nothing I’d ever seen before or since. The chef had made two tall rolls full of rice and fish eggs wrapped in dark green seaweed; sticking up out of the top was a full set of tiny, black octopus tentacles. It resembled a deranged Halloween tree, with the arms going in every direction, twisting and curling. There’s a Lovecraft monster in gaming called the Dark Young. That’s what this sushi roll looked like. It was amazing and weird and didn’t look like something you ought to put in your mouth. Monica took one look at it and freaked out.
I said, “Come on, don’t be chicken. I’ll eat one if you eat the other.”
I don’t have the picture, but someone took a photo of us, each with the tentacles hanging out of our mouths, looking silly. The special roll didn’t taste like anything because I was holding my breath, trying to crunch through tiny black tentacles. Yeesh.
Everyone agreed that dinner was great. Ten out of ten for presentation. As that was our restaurant and they recognized us, we were treated like rock stars, which made the ICE staff very happy. We asked them what they wanted to do next. There was a new David Fincher film showing at one of the several movie theaters within walking distance of the UC Berkeley campus, and several of the ICE folks were hot to see it. A movie? It’s not exactly an ideal group activity, but afterward, it’s always good for a follow-up conversation, preferably at a diner over a cup of coffee. Yeah, why not? Let’s do this!
…So, we all walked out of SeVen drained of emotion, shell-shocked, and freaked out. It was one of those movies where you remember exactly where you were when you saw it. Jeez, Louise. Weirdly, no one felt like talking much after we watched it. That lightly flirty, chatty vibe we’d established prior to buying our movie ticket was gone, so very gone. It’s almost as if a dark thriller about a horrific series of murders that ends with a head in a box was contrary to the convivial tone we’d worked so hard to establish. It was not, for the record, the worst movie choice I’d ever made for a first date. That honor goes to the movie was David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. This was close second, however.
Thankfully, ICE didn’t blame us for David Fincher’s unique directorial vision. We got points for providing an interesting evening and the Berkeley Game Distributors staff was happy that they didn’t have to put on a clean shirt. Also, the ICE folks? We were “in” from that point on. Any time we were at a conference or convention, they’d come find us to see if we wanted to go out or something.
There were a lot of oddities and weird things that happened during my time at Chessex Manufacturing, but one of the things I appreciated was after a while, they let us do our thing for the betterment of the company. We didn’t have a lot of say in how things were done, or put together, or worked on, or prioritized, but we at least had the trust and confidence to represent the company in front of the industry at large.
In hindsight, we may have been a little too good at our jobs.