Monthly Archives: April 2022

Skidmore I (Dabid’s First Roommate)

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Anxious to escape from my young life as fully as possible, my senior year of high school came and I applied to a number of far-away schools with journalism programs that seemed impressive to my teenage brain, such as The University of Rochester, The University of Chicago and Oberlin College.

But ultimately, I ended up going to a Tier I liberal arts school named Skidmore College (affectionately nicknamed by students as “Smokemore”, due to being the #1marijuana-smoking school in the country at that time, but I wouldn’t be aware of or understand the meaning of that moniker for a long time).

Truthfully, I’d never heard of Skidmore in my life until a high school guidance counselor recommended it to me in my senior year, saying that it would be a good match for me because of my extracurricular activities, headlined by being president of my school’s animal rights coalition (no, really—we called it a coalition).

Skidmore was one of a couple schools I was accepted to, but it was the only college at which I qualified for scholarships that would cover my full education, room and board, and then some (about a quarter million dollars’ worth)—so that was where I went. Having never worked so much as a part-time job at that point and having parents that had literally not put even a penny into any kind of college fund for me, four fully-paid years of education with money left over on the side sounded pretty dang alluring to me.

Enrolling at Skidmore came along with a requisite I feared and dreaded: a mandatory first year in the dorms with a roommate. Having zero siblings and never even being permitted to have or attend a sleepover (not that I would have wanted to anyway), I had no clue what sharing a single room living space with another human would be like.

I determined that the best way to prep my impending roommate for a school year in close proximity to me would be to compile and send him a list of topics that fell within my sphere of knowledge (things like The Simpsons, WWE and Days of our Lives). I believe the school gave us the E-Mails for our roommates as a means to try to break the proverbial “ice”, but I think all my efforts to provide safe subjects for discussion did was successfully freak my unlucky roommate out.

Wanting to have first crack at settling in and setting up my first dorm room before my roommate even arrived on campus, I signed up for a one-week volunteer program for incoming freshmen that would allow me to move in a week earlier than other students in my class.

Unfortunately, Skidmore had apparently seen that ploy before and had other ideas. My assigned roommate was also signed up to take part in the program, and managed to arrive even earlier than I.

My first-ever roommate, Nate W., was not exactly a match made in Heaven for me. Nate was a hardcore athlete, and he wanted no TV, lights or noise after 8PM most nights because he had to get up at like 5AM or 6AM or some other ungodly hour for something called “rowing practice” in order to increase his endurance.

Despite his being underage, Nate’s parents set up a mini fridge for him and stocked it up with beer it would be a violation of the rules for him to utilize. It was also an unexpected and scandalous experience for me waking up one morning and having there be a third person in our room: some random girl in Nate’s bed.

Clearly, this first cohabitation experience was not going to end well.

It didn’t. I returned after my first college Christmas break to find half our room—Nate’s half—cleared out and abandoned. Nate had requested a room change without telling me and had already moved on to his new home before I even knew that was a possibility. I never liked Nate and was always uncomfortable around him, but even I felt a little rejected having had my first roommate silently abandon me.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have tortured him by playing dozens of episodes of the soap opera Passions (wherein the main cast was being sucked into Hell during one night of their time that took place over months of real-time) while he was in the room, despite Nate’s vocal objections. Oh well. I guess his endurance wasn’t so great after all.

Shortpacked (or: “Dabid Hunts Grampa Simpson”)

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A shocking revelation came to my attention earlier this week: my best friend of over two decades somehow didn’t know what the word “shortpacked “ referred to. This word is so basic and commonplace to my vocabulary that I was absolutely astonished someone so close to me could be unfamiliar with it.

No, I’m not talking about “Shortpacked!”, the wildly inconsistent and frequently unfunny David Willis webcomic about collecting that I spent far too many minutes of my life reading, but in fact the terminology for a toy or figure from a set that is contained in the least quantity in a sealed shipping case assortment.

Shortpacked figures are something I thought about almost every day of my life from childhood through adulthood, as I was pretty much always on the hunt from my youth onward for the “rare” action figures from one series or another.

“Shortpacking” is a practice that occurs because manufacturers recognize that not all characters will be equally popular or marketable to the same extent, despite there still being sufficient interest to produce and sell these characters for a profit.

To prevent characters with a more “limited” appeal (such as random Mos Eisley Cantina aliens like Hem Dazon and Kitik Keed’kak in a Star Wars assortment) from clogging up the toy pegs in retail stores and thus lessening the chances of the retailer ordering more cases, toy companies will often choose to include these “hardcore fans only” figures in much smaller quantities than marquee characters (like Darth Vader).

Because the most ardent fans of a toy line tend to want to “collect them all”, these lesser-produced characters often almost paradoxically end up being the most sought after and fastest-selling figures in a lineup (making them favored targets of both fans and scalpers).

Thus, I spent many liters of gas on countless toy runs driving around looking for action figures of Grampa Simpson and finding only piles of Bart Simpson instead. (Playmates Toys misjudged their audience and falsely assumed Bart would be four times as popular as Grampa, so Bart was stupidly packed at four-per-case.)

(There’s a famous urban myth that Waylon Smithers was shortpacked in this same Simpsons toy line by Plsymates Toys, with the alleged reason being that it was because of Smithers’ sexual orientation, but that’s untrue–the figure was just slightly delayed and shipped even-packed at 2-per-case once he started to ship. After shortpacking Lisa Simpson, Grampa Simpson and Mr. Burns in Series 1 led to huge aftermarket prices for those characters and unhappy collectors, Playmates Toys went to an even-packing strategy for future assortments wherein there was rarely any shortpacked character. Hence, Smithers was not one-per-case as Grampa, Lisa and Mr. Burns had been.

Playmates Toys The Simpsons Grampa Simpsons Figure Series 1

Smithers was still tough to find, though, at least somewhat due to these controversial rumors increasing demand and also the fact that retail stores didn’t necessarily reorder a large quantity of restocks of World of Springfield Series 2, the set Smithers was a part of. I found my Smithers at the Saratoga Sorings Wilton Mall KB Toys in 2000, the only one I ever saw at retail. Smithers was the hardest figure in the whole line for me to find, as it took me months to find him–I found Grampa relatively quickly in comparison.)

These quests brought a spirit of life and adventure to toy hunting odysseys that has largely been lost in the modern internet age, wherein major toy manufacturers generally allow online retailers to order whatever quantities they want of individual figures, rather than being totally beholden to predetermined case assortments and ratios.

This fundamental shift has definitely changed the collecting landscape in a way that benefits the half-blind Dabid of today, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the thrills and disappointments of hitting dozens of stores each week in hopes of securing that rare Jean Grey figure amongst a pile of slow-selling Wolverines.