Stupid Guest Tricks

You know how it gets on some of those late night shifts where you can go for chunks of time without having any guests walk into your attraction? Had one of those nights on Pirates once, and our lead decided to take advantage of the situation and get some boats out of rotation and into the shop so he tagged a couple here and there, and of course, we'd have to leave a gap to get them into the spur area...

Anyway, we'd just sent a tagged boat out when this boy, about 9 or 10 came into the load area by himself - something about him looked squirley, so just before the boat went out I told him "now you make sure you stay right here where I told you to sit!" in my stearnest Mom voice.

I'd kind of forgotten about the kid and had rotated over to the load side of the dock when I realized that he should have come back into the dock area by now - he was the only one in the ride, and it had been more than 15 minutes...and what I assumed to be his mom and baby sister were now standing on the unload side kind of looking around like "where is he?"

Just when I was getting ready to call the tower on the intercom, I hear this sound like squish squish squish squish getting louder and louder from the doorway that goes to the lead office and I turned around to see this same kid soaked from head to toe, accompanied by our lead who was soaking wet from the waist down coming out that door! I looked at Ron and said "what happened?!" and he kind of rolled his eyes as he said "I'll tell you in a minute," as he takes the kid across one of the boats to the unload side to mom who now has her mouth hanging open in an attitude of bewilderment.

So fearless leader Ron is standing there quietly talking to mom for a moment, then she starts wagging her finger at the child as she starts shouting something unintelligable to him, then proceeds to drag him out of the building by his wet shirt with one hand while she simultaneously starts spanking him with the other...

So what happened? Ron explained that he was standing behind the flume at the control panel for the switch waiting for the tagged boat to come out behind the gap, when to his horror there is this young boy riding in what was supposed to be an empty boat. We figured out that he had been seated in the boat directly behind the tagged one and must have climbed over the rows and railings and hopped boats while the tower person held them up at drop one in trying to create the gap. I had seen the tower person leaning over on the p.a. several times, probably making a "stay seated" announcemet to the kid...

In the meantime, Ron had thrown the switch and when the kid saw that the boat he was riding in was headed into the fort instead of the rest of the ride, he panicked and climbed onto the bow. In the meantime Ron was yelling at the top of his lungs for the kid to sit down, jumping up and down, waving his arms, yelling "NO!!!!" trying to get this boy's attention - but with the sound from the battle scene, and the cannon balls in the water it did no good. The boy dove into the water thinking it was like a pool - head first, so Ron had to jump over the wall and wade in to fish the kid out - then of course he had to retrieve the boat to storage before he could bring the kid back out to the onstage area.

I would like to think that the boy grew up to actually listen to the "please remain seated" spiels.

:shock:

wow, now I know how Pirates pulls boats. At Small World, it's more the Cast Member's fault, because we stand right next to the flume and have a manual flume switch we have to pull, and we don't tag the boats, it's just pull whatever boat is empty and move the flume switch back to the ride position as quickly as possible so that the boat with guests doesn't go into boat storage. But there's always the risk of pulling a boat load of guests, which would require us to turn the pumps off and push the boats backwards so that the boat could resume it's "trip around the world", and thus taking more time to go pull boats. The worst I've ever heard of though was someone pulling our wheelchair boat thinking it was an empty boat, and having to push it back on the flume. Not easy by the way. :roll:

Leaving a gap is pretty helpful, along with tagging the boat. If you had a loose safety railing, or if one had been so flooded - usually due to loading it the wrong way - then it would need to get pulled.

We had a disaster over at Book one day with this idiot from my area - NO/CC - who had just been trained over there. There was supposed to be a boat taken offline (low battery or something), and you know how the controls are in the rock - right over there by the cave - so you can see everything, and the one thing that the leads and trainers always emphasized was don't ever throw the switch if there's a boat near the spur! Well of course this idiot did...she just lived on another planet, never ever did what she was supposed to do...and she threw the switch when there was a boat directly on top of the spur, so it got wedged there, fully loaded with guests. It took the mechanics almost an hour to get it dislodged from the thing...for a little while, we thought we were going to have to send one of the little motorized skiffs around to evac the location because there were a whole lot of Moms yelling that their kids needed to use the rest room and all that water wasn't helping! Fortunately for her fellow cast members, this woman had a baby and never came back after her maternity leave - we just wanted to kill her sometimes!