Summer Employment Part 2

With summer coming to a close, I figured I would have one last post about my joyous experience as an amusement park attendant.

Our uniforms were really simple. They gave us a colored button up shirt (pale green in color) and we had to provide khaki trousers. Nothing fancy really. I was glad that the shirts were light colored. One of the other sections (food if I recall right) had to wear navy blue shirts. As one who does terrible in hot weather, I was glad for the light coloring.

Another aspect of our uniform was name tags which had our pictures. I don’t know how many times that summer someone would call me by name and I would look at them expecting to see a familiar face. They would smile and I would remember I was wearing a nametag. The next year my family went to another amusement park on vacation. Oh boy did we have fun calling people by name.

Did you know there are height restrictions on rides for a reason? That there are some rides that are dangerous if someone is too small or too large. I worked a couple of rides that had minimum height requirements. You would not believe what parents tried to get past us. Little girls with their hair piled on top of their head, boys with hats perched extra high, children walking through on their tip toes. I don’t know why they got mad when I caught them. Then they would argue that this child rode on other rides with the same restrictions. Great. Many of us wished they would measure everyone at the front and give them different wrist bands coordinated with exactly which ride they could go on. That would make things much easier. (Can you tell I wasn’t really impressed with this employer?)

I once had a family boo me for not allowing their son (who was six inches too short) on the ride. Another set of parents complained to a manager because I put my hand on the top of their child’s head. They argued that I treated her like a doll and it was inappropriate. Oh, what happy days. Thank goodness for desk jobs.