I took a family day today and went to London, KY with my Wife, her brother, and my sister. We picked up my two younger cousins and proceeded to the World Chicken Festival which is held there annually. We arrived and began to browse the shops and we did find some interesting stuff. My wife did score a case for her cell phone and she has been trying to find some good ones for a while. We then went to the rides, where they had some good looking carnival rides and games. It was there that I encountered the rudest carnival game worker that I have ever encountered.
Usually I will throw away a couple of bucks on these games just for fun and this guy did happen to be working one of my specialty games (basketball). I looked as we passed the game the first time because, well frankly the games are rigged. Hate to spoil it for anyone but just in case you were living under a rock, yes carnival games are rigged, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny aren't real, and your mom or dad really put that money under your pillow when you lost a tooth, but back to the story. The rim on the goal was obviously bent as has been the case with every game I have seen in quite some time. My strategy is to observe the person operating the game. If they can hit their shots you can usually mimic their shot to hit yours. I observed on and off for about 30 minutes while the girls were on the rides (no food yet equals no rides for Brandon). Anywho, the worker was unable to hit a shot in about 15 attempts leading me to believe that this was far to much trouble to attempt. The worker rudely yelled at my wife and sister while they were on their way to a ride and forced them to walk over to him only to have them say that they were not interested. This would not have been so bad, had they not said no to the man 3 times before finally telling him off. I then realized that he was doing this to everyone that walked past and then cursing about it under his breathe as he only had 1 or 2 takers while I was watching. He then solicited me to play the game while I was sitting on the bench about 40 or 50 feet away and I had to tell him no at least 3 times and I finally began to ignore him. I am still a little bothered by this as anyone who has ever dealt with people should understand that the more demanding you are, the less likely you are to have people cooperate. By itself this incident would not have thrown me off but another incident earlier in the day just added insult to injury so to speak.
I am by no means a small man. I'm about 6 feet tall and currently weigh in about 328 pounds. I understand that I am a rather large individual but when walking past a rather large man himself working at a dart toss game and I hear him yell "Hey Road Block, why don't you come win the lady a prize?" it tends to rub me the wrong way. I quietly ignored this statement as to not feed this man's ego and to avoid a trip to the Laurel County Detention Center, because if I had responded with a sarcastic response like my instincts told me to (such as "the only person I see that is large enough to block a road is you."), I surely would have escalated to the point that cops needed to be called. Fortunately, I have learned over the years that my temper doesn't do anything but get me in to trouble so I kept myself calm enough to simply come home and write this.
What is the purpose of this you might ask...well simply to speak my mind in regards to the blatant disrespect that I suffered from the employees of Casey's Rides (the carnival company contracted to run the games and rides portion of the event), and to encourage anyone that may read this to avoid this company like the plague, because I can assure you that if they are hired to work for your event that you will receive similar if not worse complaints than the one that I am writing about today.
Some might ask if I would return to the Festival next year, and my response is yes, but I will not be anywhere near the workers for the Rides or the Games unless another company is contracted to provide the service. I would like to thank you for reading through this, despite it's variance from my usual subject matter.
RANT OVER
Brandon
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