What Seemed Like A Good Idea

In la la land, it should have been a blast. In a simple world there would have been laughter and smiles, and fun for all. But this was reality. And a crappy one at that. We made the decision to go to Chuck E Cheese. The land of all that is wrong in this world. The land of golden coins, screaming children, paper tickets and psychotic adults. Yes, I said psychotic adults. I could deal with the screaming children, both of mine were active participants in that at one time or another. It was the adults that drove me nuts, and here is why.

It was hard enough pushing our way through the hoards of people and kids at The Chuck, it was hard enough talking Claire out of trying to shoot basketballs at the big hoop, it was hard enough staying on the opposite side of that rodent who scares the heck out of our kids. But the biggest challenge was trying to not knock down some parent (and I have to say that every time it was a mom and not a dad that I am referring to) who has decided to spend the day at The Chuck, not encouraging their kids to wack one more mole, or munch on some sub-par pizza. No, they came to the Chuck for one thing and one thing only. They wanted to play games, damn it. And don't get in their way. They have a slight look of craziness in their eyes as they drop the golden coin into the slot, and wait for the machine to come to life. And it does. Every time. And they have to win. Every time. If they do not win the appropriate amount of tickets, they stand at the machine, with no regard to people waiting in line, and drop another gold coin into the machine. I honestly could not believe my eyes today. I saw a fancy lady with her leopard print shirt standing at a machine for at least 15 minutes, feeding the coins, pulling the tickets, and handing them to her kid, or what I assume was her kid. Coin after coin after coin went into the machine. She made a casino look like nothing. I can just imagine her at one. Yikes.

Another experience was at the Skeet Ball game, which Claire loves. Now, I will admit that I am a big fan of it too (I hit 100,000 points, woo hoo!), but Claire does the majority of the ball rolling, and we end up with some tickets. Then there was the crazy lady next to us. I don't think she even had any kids there with her. I could tell by watching her fluid motion of rolling the ball, grabbing another one, rolling that, etc etc, that she had done this before. I believe that she had, in fact, done this many many times. The look on her face was that of pure insanity as she rolled ball after ball and ticket after ticket came out of the machine. More coins, more coins, roll, roll roll, ticket, ticket, ticket. Psycho, psycho, psycho. I had decided that we would finish up with the Skeet Ball game as fast as possible, and move on to less crazy territory. But we weren't fast enough. It was in slow motion that Claire tried to roll a ball, and it jumped and went into the crazy lady's alley. Her zone was tainted. We had messed up her mode. We were going to hell. And the only reason I knew that was because her face told me so. Double yikes. I just hoped that she wasn't nuts enough to start screaming at us, waving her hands in the air above her head. We were lucky. She made some odd noise, that I guessed to mean that she was upset, and we quickly grabbed our 3 tickets and went to the other side of The Chuck.

What I am really wondering though, is what these crazy adults think they can "purchase" with these tickets? Is there a store somewhere that in exchange for Chuck E Cheese tickets, they will receive a new car, fully loaded, and maybe a down payment on a house? Or gold! I bet there is a place where they can get some quality gold in exchange for tickets. I peeked at what was available at the ticket exchange counter, and saw things like candy, stickers, pencils, party favors, etc. Nothing worth shedding blood over. Nothing that would make me push aside children to play some games. The million dollar question tonight though is this. Do all of those crazy adults know this fun little fact too? Judging by how they were acting, I don't think so.