I’ve been in a reflective/nostalgic mood lately, so I’ve come up with an idea to write a series of posts about jobs I’ve had. Hopefully I will follow through on this and actually write about most of them instead of calling one post a series.
Some of these posts may be interesting to you, and some of them may not. I’m going to write them mostly chronologically, starting near the beginning with my job as a ride attendant at American Adventures when I was 16, the summer after my sophomore year of high school.
Technically I guess that wasn’t my first job as I did get paid to help stuff envelopes for my mom’s office before that (I’m sure there’s a joke about child labor in there somewhere). But I’m skipping that for now since a blog post about stuffing envelopes would be almost as tedious as stuffing envelopes was.
Read more after the jump…
Growing up in Marietta, Ga., my mom bought my brother and I season passes to White Water over several summers. White Water is a water park now owned by the Six Flags company, which is on the verge of going out of business. The park had to close last summer when Georgia was stricken by a drought, and I have to wonder if it will make it through this season.
When I first went to White Water, it was the only park on the property. Eventually a miniature amusement park called American Adventures was built next door. There were rides for little kids, a small mini golf course, go karts, and a pretty decent video arcade. I was old enough when it was built that most of it wasn’t all that interesting to me, but considering White Water had few air conditioned buildings, it was nice to go sit inside where it was cool and get something to drink after a long day of walking around in 90-plus degree weather.
I was still playing a lot of baseball over the summers with traveling teams the summer after sophomore year. Games and practice took up a lot of time, but I had also inherited my dad’s 1987 Nissan Pathfinder. I was fortunate that my parents paid for my gas since baseball games were played all over the state and I had to do a lot of driving to get to games and practices. However, I needed to get a job if I wanted any spending money.
A friend and teammate worked at American Adventures, so I applied there probably in April or May and started working there in early June.
The job itself wasn’t brain surgery, as you might expect.
Most of the rides were no more complicated to operate than pressing one or two buttons. Many were set on automatic timers, so all I was really supposed to do while the rides were going was watch people to make sure they weren’t trying to jump out or stick their arms in dumb places.
The miniature roller coaster was probably the most complicated to operate because I did have to hit a brake button to make it stop on the platform, which required a little attentiveness and timing.
I also had to check that people met height and size requirements before they got on the rides. Some rides were too small for larger adults to fit in. Sure enough, this led to an altercation when someone who was too large to fit in a ride car did not want to follow the rules.
She was there with her (I’m guessing) granddaughter or niece, who was too small to ride by herself. So, since she was too large to fit in the car and her granddaughter was too young and small, I had to kick them both off the ride. I thought I tried to be courteous about it and explained that it was a safety issue and not personal, but it’s hard to say now how a 16-year-old’s version of courteous would come off in that situation.
The end result was I got sent home for the rest of the day. The managers weren’t mad and there were no further reprimands, they just thought it would be a good idea if this person didn’t see me around the park again that day.
It was also fun to monitor the go-karts, because sometimes you got to get out on the track and drive them around a little. They were loud as hell, however, since they all ran on lawnmower engines.
I wasn’t the most reliable employee that summer because of my baseball schedule. I took the entire month of July off because there were so many games and practices scheduled. When I came back in August to work for three or four more weeks before school started back up, my supervisor was surprised to see me.
Getting back to where I was talking about having a season pass as a kid, seeing how the sausage was made definitely affected my perspective of amusement parks. I don’t know if it stopped being fun to go to them because I was just getting older, if it had become passé because I had seen and done it all before, or if understanding what a shit job it can be made it less fun. Probably a bit of all of those things.
I am looking forward to going to Six Flags in a couple of weeks though.
Yeah, I also worked there during high school. I don’t miss the uniforms.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:49 amI refrained from mentioning the uniforms because I thought the image of me running around in red shorts would be too graphic for my family-friendly blog.
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