Unruly children are expected amid the euphoria of a singing mouse and the Whack-a-Mole. But Chuck E. Cheese has become, at least for some adults, a place where the frenzy of Skee Ball, pizza, alcohol and manic children translates into emotional overload.
Michael Moreland, 32, of Milwaukee was punched in the face by an unknown man on Jan. 4 after confronting him because he was rattling a game machine so hard that it was unplugging a neighboring machine on which Moreland’s 8-year-old daughter was playing.
Despite being asked to leave by employees, the man turned to Moreland, began yelling obscenities, gestured with his middle finger and continued to rattle the machine. The girl’s father became enraged and said to the man, “Boy, who do you think you are? You don’t do this kind of stuff at place like this.”
The man punched Moreland in the face, causing him to fall backward. In the middle of the altercation, the little girl also fell.
In my own oblique way, I was just saying that only Chuck E. Cheese could forge a national chain out of some of the worst pizza manageable. There might be a mom 'n pop out there with worse pizza, but of all the chains, C. E. C. is easily the most putrid.
I’ve hated CEC ever since I was about fifteen. Had an hour to kill at the local mall and wanted to play a few video games. They wouldn’t let me in without an adult because it was Against Their Policy. Never mind that I was fairly obviously a quiet computer geek and a sophomore in college at the time.
On the other hand, one of my favorite lines of all time from Almost Live! (a local comedy TV show in Seattle a few years back):
“In other news, the Papagayo’s exotic dance club in Bellevue has been replaced by a Chuck E. Cheese’s. However, for 20 bucks you can still get a Texas-style couch dance from the big mouse.”
Sky tubes- crawl through “habitrail”-like tubes. You know, like the kind you get for your hamster. But attached to the ceiling for kids to crawl through.
And what kind of shit? I’m not the sort of person who regularly uses the word to refer to anything but literal excerement. Someone’s little hellion had an accident. One of us had to clean it.
And I would never mean to say that a blow job is a bad thing. Just that you really don’t want one if you might pick up something highly transmittable from it. And one average, the employees at my place of work were ideal vectors.
We take the kids to CEC, a local place that’s similar and the McD’s with play areas. CEC is a little crazy when it’s busy and the only bad experience for me there was when there were several parties concurrently and there was not enough parental supervision. A couple kids were standing inside the basketball game dunking the balls and the same kids tried to jump inside a game that had a tank filled with water (duck shooting or something?) until my wife told them to stop.
I have fun watching my kids run around and have fun. It’s not the same kind of thing I would choose for myself sans kids, but I sincerely enjoy it. Overly rambunctious kids can make it less fun, though, but that’s not always the kids’ fault. Where are the parents? Now that it is summertime and it will be warm and light after work we can take the kdis to the park. I can enjoy the kids having fun outside in the fresh air.
As much as CEC sounds like hell on earth to me, the place isn’t what turned the kids into animals. Lack of supervision allowed the kids to follow their natural tendency toward acting like animals, and that’s something that’s completely unrelated to the venue. People who are good and attentive parents who supervise their kids adequately don’t undergo some mysterious personality change and quit watching their kids as soon as they walk through the door.
Exactly. I had parents turn to me and ask me to impose some order upon the packs that ran wild and free, raiding breadsticks and abandoning the slower members to be devoured.
A favourite moment comes from this- an exhausted mother turns to me after nearly being trampled and says “make them behave so we can actually eat what we paid for”. I point out that that particular herd was composed of her own children and disappear into the kitchen. Hauling out the hundred bags of rubbish stored with the pizza boxes and paper cups was a more fruitful alternative.
Another priceless minimum-wage moment- a grandmother tells me to come back to the table. She says she notices how hard we work to clean the showroom and she has a tip for me. When we get to the table, she takes my bottle o’windex and my blue scrubby cloth and shows me that I must clean the underside of the table, as children are fond of putting their hands under there. I smelled of pizza and puke for a year, no matter how hard I scrubbed. I couldn’t stomach the thought of melted cheese and tomato sauce.
The place did serve an important function, however. As miserable as I was, as much as I hated getting out of bed, as much as I hated still being alive in the morning when I had to work there, it taught me an important lesson. School is good, degrees are even better. I was a smartass kid who though she was too brilliant to pay attention. No one cares that you’re slinking home to read Ulysses when you’re in that red visor.
It also taught me to respect the hell out of people who do work in food service. (Hell, any kind of customer service. I’ve been a drugstore clerk, bookseller, secretary…)I’ve done my time elbow deep in scalding water. Currently in our research insitute, we’ve got a few of us who took this route. It’s a special sort of brotherhood that, above all, tips well.
