This year I will be attending Botcon 2007, guaranteed to be the best Botcon ever. Especially considering there will be an early screening of the movie and enough hype around the franchise to make it more than just another convention on the summer con circuit.
Botcon 2007 will be my sixth Botcon, having gone every year since 2001 with the exception of 2005 when it took place in Texas. It was a huge letdown not being able to justify the trip in 2005 for various reasons, but it was a decision I’d probably have to make again given the chance to repeat events all over. Needless to say though, I’m a huge Transformers fan. I’m a member of the Transformers Collectors’ Club. I collect the toys, watch the shows, buy all the comics and in recent years figured out how to give back to the fandom.
This year’s Botcon is additionally significant, in that it will be taking place in Providence, Rhode Island. Only a couple hours away from where a live, not to mention the home of Hasbro, itself. Being so close to the ‘Mother Ship’ as it is, many of the convention goers assumed tours would take place at Hasbro, which for someone like me, is beyond awesome. When the preregistration forms came online, it was confirmed that there would indeed be tours. Within days though, it was said that only the first 400 pre-registrants would have the opportunity to go on the tour in addition to 100 randomly drawn names from the remaining pool of registrants. Now to get a feel on things, this year’s preregistration was the largest in history. I want to say that in 2004 there were over 1500 preregistrants. So feel free to extrapolate that number. The bottom line: Unless you pre-registered the day the form went up (a Sunday) or the day after, you’re chance of going on the tour was slim to none. As soon as I heard about the huge numbers of faxes being sent in, I faxed mine in immediately. That was Tuesday around 2 o’clock.
Weeks later, when I got my confirmation number, I was crushed to see that I was number 486 (coincidentally only 3 more than the price it cost me to preregister). Even though the confirmation numbers supposedly didn’t mean anything, I was utterly disappointed. The list of the 100 lottery winners went up the other day and no surprise, I wasn’t on it. A day later I got my confirmation letter for preregistration. It confirmed was that I was not going on the tour. I am utterly let down.
I don’t normally let things bother me these days, but this is really nagging at me.
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