This is a generalisation, but one of those generalisations that are true. At a comic con, the women's toilets will be fine. Relatively clean, tidy, and barely resembling a bathroom from Silent Hill at all. The men's are another matter entirely, which is almost completely down to the key difference that men get the opportunity to pee all over the floor, and boy do they make the most of that privilege. The one upside the men's room has over the girl's is the lack of another blasted queue, but that's definitely connected to how little mind the dudes are giving to their aim. At the very least you have to make sure not to indulge in the shameful faux pas of approaching a creator you admire at the urinal, as one fan famously did to Frank Miller at San Diego. You may be relieving yourself in a bathroom akin to the sort they had in the Dark Ages, but you retain some dignity.
10. What To Do With All This Free Junk
The first thing you get given upon arriving at the venue is your unnecessarily large convention programme that is both less informative and more unwieldy than the one online, a lanyard that is both your pass and contains a smaller programme that you'll actually use, and then they'll saddle you with the largest shopping bag that you've ever seen that's already full of tat you'll never, ever use. Promotional comics from a publisher you've never heard of, check. Pamphlets for low-budget sci-fi films that will never be released, check. Multiple flyers advertising the very convention you're already at, triple frickin' check. You can't even dump the thing because it seems rude and there don't seem to be any bins around anyways, so instead you use it to keep all the other free stuff you'll be handed over the weekend and suffer the same dilemma with.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
