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With some jobs, the risks are obvious. Want to be an F1 racer? Driving cars at unsafe speeds is pretty much the extent of your work responsibilities. Firefighter? Be prepared to get up-close and personal with dangerous flames, because after all, the position isn’t called “fire-mediation-and-peacekeeping-liaison.”

Working the gate at a fan event for a video-sharing website seems like it should be relatively safe, though. That’s not always the case, though, as one man found out when he became a human speed bump standing against a crowd of stampeding fans at the recent Niconico Chokaigi.

Ostensibly, online video-sharing sites, such as Japan’s Niconico Douga, should have been the end of media consumers’ need to rush anywhere for their pop culture fix. Simply whip out your smartphone or fire up your PC, pull up the video you want to watch, and enjoy while you relax on your living room sofa, chair at work, or toilet (whichever happens to be your preferred viewing location).

Ironically, though, Niconico Douga has become so popular that parent company Dwango now hosts an annual event for fans called the Niconico Chokaigi (literally “Niconico Super Conference”). This year’s Chokaigi took place last weekend at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba Prefecture, with a reported 151,115 attendees showing up over the two days. Not only was the crowd large, it was enthusiastic, with fans lined up before the official start of the festivities at 10 a.m., even on the second day.

But while everyone seemed patient and well-mannered while they were outside the venue, the same couldn’t be said for what happened once organizers began letting people in, as shown in this crazy video from Twitter user rader2525.

As the mass of humanity surges forward, one fearless worker tries to slow them down. And he succeeds in stemming the tide…for about three seconds.

After being sent tumbling and colliding with the concrete flooring with a solid thwack, the staffer picks himself up, fixes his hair, and gives a rueful hard stare at the crowd that just bowled him over. But while he seems to have been ill-prepared for the unstoppable force of a sprinting wave of otaku, the mad dash seems to have been within the rest of the organizers’ expectations, since it’s preceded by a race-style countdown and one staff member seems to have been posted specifically to record video of the spectacle.

But it’s not all bad news. There’s a brief respite as the staff closes off the gate as part of the staggered entrance system, with just one more attendee, a young women, coming in as part of the first batch. As she barrels forward, she suddenly loses her footing and completely eats it, right in front of the man who was knocked over.

Could this romantic comedy-like symmetry be the start of a beautiful friendship?

Sadly, no. The woman is obviously in a hurry to see all of the exhibits at the Niconico Chokaigi and is gone in a heartbeat,  But at least this guy still has the memory of their encounter, and possibly the bruises from his surprisingly dangerous job.

Source: Hachima Kiko, Twitter
Top image: Niconico Chokaigi