New Rides Suck.

What does that mean? "New Rides Suck." Well, I had the pleasure of working in a park for so long that I was able to watch four new rides put up. All of them had problems. So they don't suck in the fun factor, they just suck for like the first two months they open. Why? I don't know. But here's my theory based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever.

So, the first ride I was around for that the park put in was a water ride. Pretty simple thing. They had an employee preview night which I now know they do for every new ride they put in. Everything worked perfectly. Or at least that's what I heard because I didn't go. Anti-social tendencies. Well, the next day they opened up to the public, and everything was going great until a group of people got stuck on the ride. Because it was a water ride they couldn't just get out of the seats. They had to wait. They fixed it, and operation continued as normal. The very next day the same thing happened. People stuck, can't get out. Maintenance guy comes. They continue as normal. This happened for like the first month the ride opened, and then one day it just stopped. Cool.

Second new ride I was around for was a roller coaster type thing. Employee preview went fine. Open up to the public and it has problems. This one they shut down for days at a time. Then after operation continues, something else happens and boom bang pow, the ride is shut down again.

Third ride. Same, exact, thing. Employee preview is fine. They open up to the public and then a bunch of problems happen. Ride is shut down.


Here's the thing about roller coasters. They can test run the things as much as they want to, but they'll never be able to know how the ride handles ten plus hours straight of operation with an extra couple thousand pounds weighing down on the ride. Every single new ride that has been introduced in that park that I worked at has not opened smoothly. Not one.

So my advice to you is to wait it out. If you try going the first day, you might be waiting for hours in line only to find that the ride went down right as you got to the front. Fun way to spend your day, right?

The Food is Priced Way Too High

Have you ever wondered why the food in theme parks is so ridiculously priced? I have as well. After having been in the park for sometime, I've come to the conclusion that parks do it simply because they can. I mean that's easy money, right? It's genius. Ban food from entering the park and then hike up the food prices. It's also a way for them to push their all season food passes and their season passes. Purchase this thing and you get to eat free every time you come here!

Funny thing is, if you're an employee you get the same food at a much cheaper price. In the park, a candy bar is like four dollars. Employees get the same thing for eighty-five cents. Chicken Strips and fries are like ten to fifteen dollars and we got them for five bucks. Sodas are four or five dollars and employees got them from the vending machines for a dollar. Hey, the company does like their employees.

The staff also gets a pretty hefty discount on like everything. It brings all the overpriced nonsense back into check. That fifteen dollar funnel cake I've had marked down to seven dollars. The seven dollar bowl of dipping dots I get for three or four dollars. I got on go-carts for free, the sky coaster thing I got on for free, the elephants I got on for free. Maybe that's why I stuck around so long...

Anyways, here's an inside secret. It's pretty damn easy to get outside food into the park. I mean you aren't getting a full blown rotisserie chicken on the premises but if you want to take a few candy bars in your pockets you can more than likely get into the gates with that. I can not count the number of times I've seen folks with outside food in the park. Some lady even complained to one of my coworkers about it one time. He didn't do anything though (because let's be honest, it wasn't that big of a deal for a kid to be munching on a bag of chips).

And there you have it, another trade secret to benefit the greater good!

There's No Such Thing As A Dumb Question.

At a different park I used to work at I had the luxury of working with animals. One thing I noticed about that park is that everything you could do to get near them was highly advertised. It was great, you could swim with the Dolphins, you could feed giraffes, you could pet a sloth, sleep with tiger, fly on the back of a bald eagle. Crazy stuff.

When you walked in the park, they usually had a trainer handling a smaller animal that you could get up close and personal with. Something like a snake, or a Parrot. They even had a penguin out one time. When you walked around the park there were statues of all the animals, a bunch of signs pointing to where the animals are. Animals were a huge thing at that park.

On one occasion I was walking through the main entrance. A guy stopped me in front of the Dolphin tank that had a window where you could look inside. His back was to the tank and I was looking directly at it. Keep in mind here he had already passed one of the handlers in the very front of the park, and at least three adverts that had something to do with animals.

"Excuse me sir. Do you work here?" he says.

Of course I don't. I just cosplay an employee in my free time and wear this bright shirt, name tag, and a radio on my hip so I can appear more convincing.

"Yeah, how can I help you?" I ask.

Right as one of the dolphins swam up to the window to get a better look at the dirty kid that was standing in it, this guy asks me a question.

"Are there animals in the park?"

I'm convinced that at that moment I had a minor heart attack. This guy had caught me so off guard that I temporarily lost my balance. I was noticing a slight pain in my chest and a headache was setting in so I held my hand out and asked this gentleman to give me moment. I couldn't believe it. This question was so stupid I started questioning myself whether or not there were animals in the park and I'd been working there for over a year.

I realized there was still some hope left. Maybe he just meant what kind of animals. So I asked him that.

"Do you mean what kind of animals?"

That's a hint right? I gave him a hint to the answer of his question. There was no way he could have meant what I thought he meant.

"No, just animals in general. I wanted to know if you guys had animals here in the park."

I couldn't handle it. I quit. On the spot.

The Games Are Winnable...Sort of

Every game in the park is winnable. Every single god damn one. But what no one will ever tell you is the employees actually have a significant influence on the hardest games. Crazy thought right? Here's an example. Everyone is familiar with the ladder game right? Well if you're not. Here's a quick run down. You have to climb a rope ladder and ring a bell at the top. But the trick is you have to do it without flipping over. There is also usually a red rung at the top you have to stand on first to prevent taller people from ringing the bell early.

That game is probably the hardest game in the park that is completely skill based. Once you figure it out, you can pretty much beat any one at any park, assuming the park wants you win. What we used to do in an attempt to pull some extra cash in was make the game extremely easy in the morning when no one was in the park. Simple task. If you loosen the ladder, it's easier to climb. Once some little kid won and was walking around with a giant Scooby we'd tighten the ladder back up to how it was originally. The game was still winnable, but no average joe was going to be able to win the game anymore. If you didn't know what you were doing, the chances of you making it more than halfway up were pretty slim. But since people saw a kid with the prize, chances are they'd be curious as to how he'd attained that Scooby Doo. "The kid can win it, so why can't I?"

I used to take it a step further. After a year or so of working the game I had it down to the point where it didn't matter how the tight the ladder was. The station I worked had three ladders and people usually paid near the far left or the far right ladder.

So what I would do is make the two ladders closest to where you pay harder than the one on the far side. Most people would just hop on the one closest to them and they'd fall relatively early in the game. This made my transactions quicker, and if I had kids play I wouldn't need to help them get on since I could just put them on the easiest ladder. Whenever people asked for demonstrations, I'd demonstrate on the hardest one so they'd want to climb that one. Simple way to pull in more money.

I haven't done that in awhile, now I just make them all hard.