old-timey tales of annoying anime fans

[davemerrill]

this is an article I wrote for the good ol' Anime Jump website, which is more or less no longer in service. I figured I'd share it and see if anybody else has any startling tales of outstanding anime fan annoyance. I believe one of these stories involves a fan that both I and someone on this message board had to deal with.

Some background: Back in the pre-DVD era, when you had to swap stuff with strangers through the mail to get any kind of decent Japanese cartoons, we brave pioneers would find ourselves having to get a little closer than we liked to certain specimens of the genus "anime-fannus North Americanus." These are but a few of the many tales that make up the warp and weft of the rich tapestry that is your heritage as an Anime Fan, and they should serve both as amusing anecdotes AND as cautionary examples.

Back when I was swapping tapes and copying tapes for people through the Anime Hasshin tape traders list, one guy from California got in touch with me. He sent his list, asked for my list, I sent my list, he sent me a big letter back commenting on what I had and asking why I didn't make copies in 6-hour mode. I replied that (1) they suck, quality-wise, and (2) they're my VCRs and I'll do with 'em what I want.

He sent me a letter back more or less agreeing with me or at least saying "to each his own". Well, a week later I get a tape in the mail from him, and a request list that is almost exactly six hours long. I'm like, whatever, and the tape is put aside to be dealt with later. One week later, I get a long, hateful, pissed-off letter from the guy, asking where the hell his tape is, how dare I treat anime fans in this way, where do I get off behaving in such an obnoxious fashion, he always makes sure he gets his tapes done quickly, etc etc.

So what I do is I dig out my oldest, funkiest, top-loading 2-head VCR that only records in black and white (it was dropped onto a sidewalk), and I use it to record his tape, and every so often as I pass the machine I give it a mighty smash with my hand or other suitable blunt instrument. He got all six hours of anime and I never heard from him again.

Though I would give a million bucks to see his reaction when he tried to watch it. I wonder if he sat through the entire tape, on the off chance that ANY of it was watchable?

So back in, like, 1989-1990, the phone rang and it was the operator, asking if I would accept the charges on a collect call from a person whom I didn't know. I figured it had to be an emergency, or at least really important, so I said "yes". BIG MISTAKE.

So basically, this caller is a guy who got my name out of the Cartoon Fantasy Organization Directory and figured he'd call me collect and ask lots of questions about Japanese shows in general and the live-action superhero show Spectreman in particular. No emergency, no crisis, not even somebody I would have wanted to talk to at all, even if I HADN'T been paying for the dubious privilege. He wanted to know this, he wanted to know that, he wanted me to send him tapes and fanzines for free, out of the goodness of my heart and the bottomlessness of my bank account, the extent of both having been greatly exaggerated somewhere down the line. From what I could gather from his rambling conversation, his father wouldn't let him call people unless it was collect and he wouldn't give him any money to spend on fanzines, so he had to go beggin'. Sorry, pal. I finally got off the phone with him - I was raised to be polite, and just-- HANGING UP on someone is simply - well - RUDE! He called right back the next day and I refused the charges. He called back several times over the weekend and we refused the charges.

About a year later he called AGAIN. I heard the operator ask if I'd accept the charges from this guy's name, and I said "NOOOOOOOO!!" in slow motion, just like in the movies, and threw the telephone across the room.

Apparently I wasn't the only person to get the collect treatment - a pal of mine in South Carolina also got nailed, and I seem to recall former C/FO generalissimo Randall Stukey himself being on the recieving end of the guy we started to refer to as "The Collect Call Bandit." I wish I could remember what that guy's name was. My guess is that he was institutionalized, and whenever he got out of the mental hospital or wherever, he leaped to the nearest telephone and started collect-calling people like a maniac until the white coats could pry him loose and get that straightjacket back on him.

Anyway the moral of the story is never, ever accept collect calls from strangers. Those 10-10-20 people are LYING TO YOU.

Oh, and never let people print your home phone number anywhere.

The hands down most annoying guy I ever swapped tapes with was a guy named "Biff Juarez". I bring you this tale as a cautionary measure because my research indicates he's still active in fandom, so watch out.

He's another guy I got in touch with via the Anime Hasshin traders list. Geez, where do I begin? His video lists were handwritten on three-hole lined notebook paper, and he didn't follow the lines but managed to get about three lines of text for every line of the paper. He would write six-page-long letters in the same handwriting asking hundreds of trivial, pointless questions. His tape requests would always be for the oddest, hardest-to-dig-out things on my list. He would include various right-wing pamphlets with his mail, including the famous urban legend alert about how the evil atheists, led by Murray-O'Hare herself, were going to get all religious programming banned from TV. His religious and political affiliations seemed strange to me, since half his list consisted of hard-core porno movies.

Oh yeah, speaking of God, he once wrote a review of Superbook and Flying House, and completely neglected to mention anywhere in the review that these shows were Bible stories or were religious in any way. Was he mental, or just trying to trick anime fans into watching Christian propaganda? Who knows?

But all this is just the mildly annoying stuff. What REALLY annoyed me about the guy?

For one thing, he shipped EVERYTHING 4th class book rate, which means it takes three weeks and the post office uses it for batting practice. Nothing would induce him to ship things first class, not even sending him the extra postage. Invariably he would use the fiber-particle filled mailers, over and over again, so anything you got would be covered with tiny bits of paper and fiber. Thanks, Biff.

(Take a tip from the Ol' Perfesser; wrap your videotapes in plastic first -Saran wrap, comic bags, whatever- and then you can use whatever kind of mailer you want!)

Another charming habit he had involved trading tapes. You'd buy brand new tapes and copy his requests onto them. He in turn would be copying YOUR requests onto whatever tapes he happened to have lying around - whether they were brand new or had been used over and over again. He explained that this was because he was in the habit of re-copying everything he got onto 6-hour tapes, apparently to save space in his closet. Now, not only does this mean that everything he had looked like crap, but that if you traded with him, you were getting crappy copies onto videotape of unknown pedigree. Sony tape, Recoton box, Focal labels, you know the drill. Lord knows I'm not a picky guy when it comes to video quality, but I draw the line with this sort of thing.

Yet another of his traits was to fill up your tapes with whatever garbage he happened to have handy, on the off chance you happened to be interested in it. It's one thing to get this sort of stuff IN ADDITION to what you asked for, but to get it INSTEAD of your requests is another thing entirely. Or when you agree to swap three tapes, and he sends you four, the extra one full of unasked-for junk, just so he can squeeze an extra tape out of you.

And yet, I didn't quit dealing with him until he tried to pull a fast one on a friend of mine (let's call her Lisa Black). He got on her bad side, so she refused to copy any more tapes for him. In order to get around her embargo, he started to send her blanks under a different name. I dunno - maybe it WAS his cousin, like he claimed. I don't care. Anyway, she saw through the ruse - Biff wasn't smart enough to change his ordering habits, or handwriting - and cut him off AGAIN. When he told me that he was disappointed "that I was still dealing with that Nazi Lisa Black," I told him that I'd been trading with Lisa for 10 years and she's one of the few truly decent people in a hobby full of obnoxious jerks, and that he could go screw himself, with a big dick, with big red straps. Goodbye to shitty copies of obscure robot anime, to ripped fiberpack mailers, to 4th class book rate, to letters full of questions and demands.

Yes, there are a few times when I'm exceptionally mauldlin or exceptionally stupid, when I reminisce about the "good old days" of swapping tapes through the mail. Sure, it was exciting, and I made a lot of great friends through the tape-trading networks. But all things being equal, if the harsh modern world of the 21st century means I'll never get bitched out by total strangers over copies of Japanese cartoons, then I'm all for it.

This article could have been a lot longer. I totally left out the story about the local fan who'd call me up to ask if I could build a web page for him, or if he could tag along with the 10 of us who were already filling up 2 cars to go to A-Kon. He got kicked off AWA staff for wandering into the ops room, going over to the cash box, picking it up, and asking "Hey, what's this?" I won't even get into the other staffer who was booted & tresspass-warned from our facility for stalking guests.

I still can't believe we used to have our home addresses and phone numbers printed in fanzines and mailings. Don't ever do this, kids.

[whitesnake]

Lisa Black? Really? Thanks for the kind words. Hey, that bozo got so pissed off at me for some reason. He said a friend of his, some guy who was a bit slow mentally, wrote to me to ask for some anime. And I supposedly wrote back to him, replying in some cruel fashion. Later I was watching a Dirty Harry movie, and one of Dirty Harry's speeches was, word for word, what I supposedly replied to his friend. Like I'd write down something from a Dirty Harry movie just to save the speech to reply to someone who was mentally challenged.

And I also heard from that other bozo (from Southern, not Northern California) who'd call collect. He was a live action kaiju fan and so whiny. Why should I care to hear him whine about his uncle finding him in bed with some other guy? It wasn't my business. I gave him the name of my friend Matt, a big Godzilla fan. Somehow he got Matt's unlisted phone number and was calling him day and night. Matt described him as the fan who wanted to know what color Godzilla's toenails were in each movie. Matt and I were both generally tolerant, but we both told him NEVER to phone up this certain Godzilla expert who wouldn't suffer fools gladly. So of course he did. The expert threatened to kill him. At some later Bay Area anime convention, the expert was supposed to be on a Godzilla panel, but he didn't show up. Since it was supposed to be a panel, and only one poor guy was sitting on stage by his lonesome, Matt and I decided to join the panel too. The audience only slightly outnumbered us, but as soon as one fan in the audience opened up his mouth to ask (a bunch of) questions, we recognized his voice. Godzilla expert wasn't there, or there'd have been pieces of whiny fan all over that room.

Some of those people thought that, no matter how busy you were taping for other people, you'd always have time to copy anime for them too. A couple of them would send blank tapes with their requests, and their want list, but never say please or thank you. They'd get their requested anime, but I tell them never to bother me again, since they weren't the least bit appreciative.

But there were many great people I occasionally traded tapes with. And a few of them I'm still in contact with.

[davemerrill]

I figured you'd get a kick out of the psuedonym. He quoted a Dirty Harry movie at you? That's hilarious. He gave me a big story about how his cousin, was also a big anime fan and also liked the fairly particular things HE liked, wanted to swap tapes with you, but that his cousin was slow, so "Biff" had to handle all the actual tape mailing, etc. Uh huh, sure. I understand he has, or had, a booth at a flea market in Jacksonville selling Transformers toys. I have been tempted, when in the area, to see if he's still in business.

Astounded to see that the 'collect call bandit' had such a wide variety of victims, and that he was allowed to walk around in public.

For the most part the tape traders I dealt with were friendly. I'd say less than one out of twenty was a hassle. But it's that one out of twenty that makes for the great stories.

When CPF was doing most of their distribution through the mail, Matt had an extremely specific set of rules spelled out very clearly, and somehow people would ALWAYS manage to screw things up. People don't read for comprehension.

There was one tape trader who sent in blanks, I copied tapes, sent them back. Apparently they never showed up. So I got an email about it. Said "what the heck", copied the tapes again, sent them out, on my own dime. In return I got ANOTHER email complaining that the tapes had tracking errors, or weren't what was asked for, or something, and that I had to 'make it right' because apparently we were running a business, or something. That is SO NOT THE CASE.

Recently (in the past decade) I wrote an Anime Jump review of a title, and mentioned that it had recieved an unreleased Intersound (Robotech people) dub in the 80s. One commenter called me on it and said I was mistaken. So I offered to send this person the dub in question on a DVD, and did so. Apparently it never showed up. Person was kind of huffy about it. So, I copied the DVD again. Photographed the DVD, the envelope it was placed in, and on a trip to the States I had myself photographed holding the envelope, in front of the post office. I mailed the envelope and posted all the photos to the AJ message board. If it didn't show up, it wasn't my fault. Apparently it did finally make it, and the person who questioned its existence was kind of quiet after that.

I think the most recent story was about a guy who became really irritated that I wouldn't rip and torrent a show that I'd written about on Let's Anime so he could fansub it. Never mind that my copies of the show are 4th or 5th generation, not suitable for any kind of fansub work, never mind that I offered to put it on a DVD and mail it to him (where-ever he was in the world, Russia I believe) no, he wanted it torrented. Well, not doing that right now, and while it would probably be pretty easy, somebody attempting to argue me into doing it is not the way to go about it.

[usamimi]

Yikes! It just goes to show you, no hobby is safe from random crazy fans, huh? I learned that the hard way when I was young, too...

My first annoying/scary fan interaction was when I was REALLY young (I believe still in middle school)...apparently I had inadvertently made someone mad on a Yahoo Mailing list I was on (I never actually found out what I did to piss her off so much, either) so she extracted her revenge by helping me write a Christmas-themed anime version of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" for the Mailing List...by feeding me plagiarized lines from someone ELSE'S version that I had no knowledge about! I should've known something was up when she said I could take all the credit for it and didn't have to include her name on the work AT ALL. So when I uploaded it to the mailing list, almost immediately someone recognized it and called me a thief and a copy-cat, ripping off someone else's work. I was so confused I didn't know what to do so I deleted it from the group and left the mailing list...and then I got A PHONE CALL from the mailing list's maintainer (apparently she remembered my real name and went to the library and found my parent's phone number and called me all the way from another time zone) demanding I explain what happened. She was understanding, though, and when I told her about the other user who had basically set me up, she got her name and I think banned her from the mailing list. She said she'd explain what happened to the other members, but I never re-joined after that, so I don't know what happened. I was only like 16 when that happened, but it still really pissed me off and made me feel completely embarrassed.

The second time I had an annoying/scary fan interaction was when I first started making penpals who were anime fans. Most of them were great (I'm still good friends with several of them!), but I met this one girl who I didn't really hit it off with, so I stopped writing to her because she was kind of annoying and we didn't have all that much in common, anyway. Well, she, too, looked up my parent's phone number at the library and called me all the way from the East Coast (I think she was in New England) while I was IN SCHOOL (I don't know why she wasn't in school, maybe she was home schooled?) and demanded that my parents let her talk to me. When they told her I wasn't home, she accused them of lying (?!) and made all these crazy accusations about how I was mean to her and asked them why I hadn't written her back any letters. I got yelled at about that, my parents telling me I needed to be more careful about who I gave our address to. We got an unlisted phone number shortly after that, thank goodness. x__x

[davemerrill]

That is some seriously stalky behavior right there.

[greg]

He would include various right-wing pamphlets with his mail, including the famous urban legend alert about how the evil atheists, led by Murray-O'Hare herself, were going to get all religious programming banned from TV.

Oh gosh, I hate that crap. I've certainly received that exact message so many times. "HELLO? Touched By An Angel hasn't been on TV in over 10 years!" Coming from a conservative family, I've had to tell aunt and uncle to fact check with Snopes first before propagating falsehoods like that. I don't know which is worse: the naive conservatives who fall for that crap or the liberals who think up those messages just to troll conservatives and make them look stupid. Because I figure that it would take some clever liberal to prey on the fears of people like this just to get a good laugh, like those who write computer virus programs. Some of those e-mails are actually very eye-opening and true, like the one that compared George Bush's fancy ranch in Texas to Al Gore's fancy house, and you have to guess whose home is the unbelievably eco-friendly one and the other is a huge energy-waster. (I'll spoil it for everyone: Al Gore is a huge hypocrite.)

I also hate those stupid chain e-mails with some stupid ASCII text picture of an angel and they say stuff like, "Copy this letter to 20 other people and you will receive lots of luck/career success/sexual exploits/fluffy kittens/etc." I don't see so many of the threatening variety anymore, but back in the '90s there were plenty of those. "Sally Vacuumcleaner of Vancouver, BC sent this message to 20 people and she won the lottery, met the man of her dreams, and had a highly successful career. Bill Potatoslicer of Sacramento, CA disregarded this message, and he was riddled with bullets by a drive-by shooting right before he was ran over and decapitated by a school bus on fire."

There was a discussion on the Racketboy forum (website dedicated to retro video games) about the nature of nerds. Somebody pointed out that since nerds are the ones who are chastised and bullied for being different all through out our childhood and adolescence, you'd think that nerds, of all people, would learn how to treat people kindly. But no, they can be the worst, especially when it comes to what the collective "Anonymous" from 4chan is capable of doing, harrassing people night and day (and I think even driving people to suicide, IIRC).

While I consider myself a nerd, nerddom can include some rather pathetic people, full of obsessive/compulsive disorders and sociological disorders. My biggest such story is fairly recent though, in the past 8 years, and it's actually video game-related. I made the mistake of befriending one OCD guy who didn't have a job because he graduated with a worthless poli sci major and had some anxiety disorder that prevented him from getting a job like a normal person. So, he lived with his folks and would call me from their phone constantly. I started letting the answering machine weed him out, until he decided that I just must not be home, so therefore it would be best to just continually call me until I got home, even if it was past 11pm. My wife started really freaking out, and wondered if he was some sort of stalker. I had to ask him to stop calling me. Then I got an e-mail from him about how I had hurt his feelings, especially since I refused to sell him a spare game system I owned at the time, and how I am no different than all the other people who told him to get lost. My response was that perhaps he should consider the obvious pattern of behavior that it was he who was driving everyone away, not the other way around.

Anyhow, I guess the guy eventually balanced himself out, more or less. I can't pretend that I am the nicest person, but being picked on constantly in school for being "different" taught me how to basically not treat people, even though it took me a while to learn that. Unfortunately, many nerds just don't ever learn that lesson.