kartooner

A few years ago I worked for an amuse­ment park named Cas­tle Park. The fol­low­ing is a poignant rec­ol­lec­tion of my expe­ri­ence while work­ing for the “Park”.

Hon­estly, I had never intended to work for the park but con­sid­er­ing it was the eas­i­est job I’ve ever applied for in my life — it just goes to say that I’m glad I did it. Need­less to say, the inter­view process was dead sim­ple, to the point where I was hired on the spot and returned to the park the fol­low­ing Tues­day for the “ini­ti­a­tion” and “imple­men­ta­tion” process.

For starters, they made us all sign what seemed like thou­sands of papers (legal doc­u­ments, tax forms, etc.) and then we were assigned our Park uni­forms. At the time, these con­sisted of a green Polo shirt with the Cas­tle Park logo emblazened on the front and biege khaki shorts. The gear reminded me of log­ger wear rather than exud­ing some­thing along the lines of proud employ­ees of the Amuse­ment profession.

Fol­low­ing the uni­form assign­ment we were then given a tour of the Park, which included a tour of the 3-level arcade and park grounds. Cas­tle Park has, give or take, around 30 or so rides that make up the adult, smaller chil­dren and kid­die rides. Depend­ing on your par­tic­u­lar assign­ment for that evening you were either stuck in Kid­die Land or blessed with the oppor­tu­nity to help out in Teenager Land.

I pre­ferred Kid­die Land at first and even­tu­ally longed to oper­ate the cooler kid rides, which seemed a smidge more tech­no­log­i­cally advanced. You see, you have to work up a spe­cific hier­ar­chy when you’re first hired at Cas­tle Park. It’s a lot like going through high school all over again. For­get about start­ing on the Log Ride because your first step is the Fly­ing Ani­mals and if you’re lucky The Indi­ana Jones (rip-off) attraction.

Like the rest of the wide-eyed employ­ees I was sum­moned to the Fly­ing Ani­mals. Granted, there is noth­ing wrong with fly­ing drag­ons and bears but the ride itself sort of gave me the creeps. I often thought how strange it was to see small chil­dren rid­ing around in hol­lowed out ani­mal heads.
The day they trans­ferred me to another ride was a day in Amuse­ment Park Heaven for me. In my mind I was now an offi­cial “Ride Oper­a­tor”, a posi­tion that reverred author­ity and nat­u­rally put fear into the hearts of young children.

Even­tu­ally I was trans­ferred to the Sea Planes ride where I could uti­lize my skills as a wannabe DJ. It was here where I took advan­tage of the mic sys­tem, which, on a good day ampli­fied your voice sev­eral feet in diam­e­ter. The Sea Planes were hydraulically-powered planes hov­er­ing over a moat of water wherein the child had con­trol of the lift and dip of the plane with the stick.

My announce­ment before start­ing the ride sounded some­thing like this:

Wel­come to Cas­tle Park Sea Planes. The ride is about to start, but first! Remem­ber to keep all hands and feet in the plane at ALL times. To make the plane go up pull back on the stick, to make the plane go down push forward.

Thank you and enjoy the rest of your stay here at Cas­tle Park.

When I moved onto the other rides I pretty much kept the same speech but obvi­ously tweaked it in rela­tion to the spe­cific ride I was oper­at­ing. Of spe­cial note, one par­tic­u­lar ride called the ‘Cyclone’ basi­cally whirled around back­wards and for­wards depend­ing on the set­ting you assigned it.

Time and time again I would cross my fin­gers, hop­ing some­one would get sick so that they would shut down the ride for a few moments of san­ity. How­ever, some­one get­ting sick was rare and there­fore I had to indure the hours of scrutiny and stu­pid­ity from America’s finest park atten­dees. Who­ever said the “cus­tomer is always right” should be blud­geoned with a sack of meat­balls. You real­ize, after work­ing with the pub­lic and espe­cially in a recre­ational hot spot, that the pub­lic leaves their brains at the entrance.