I'm the senior attendant at the Namco arcade at my local mall. Prepare for a rant.
I get paid nothing ($6.80 an hour, whoopee!), but a lot of the time I'm doing nothing, so it kinda works out. However, if I didn't live at home, I'd have to find a job that pays better.
Basically, my role is to both an emotionless and ever-obedient pin-cushion, and a teacher/assistant for the unimaginably stupid. If I'm not being bitched out for things that I cannot control (such as game malfunctions or company policies), I'm walking a customer step-by-step through a very mundane and easy-to-understand task (such as locating one of our three distinctive token changers that have bright yellow "TOKENS" signs on the front and lit-up "TOKENS" signs mounted on top (and two are located right at the entrance)...or telling a kid for the umpteenth time that 15 tickets is, in fact, not enough to buy a 90-ticket item).
Some things I've observed:
- I've had to explain the concept of losing a game to kids so many times that I stopped having any empathy for them about a year ago.
- The "hey, I'll take all of that" joke, which inevitably pops up whenever I pull out the wad of cash I hold in my pocket to give change, got old before I even became an employee.
- Speaking of change, so many people ask me, "hey, would you happen to have some $1's?" that I sometimes wonder what they would do if I honestly didn't.
- The concept of forming a line seems to be tied to the presence of a cash register, because people will crowd the prize booth and shove tickets in my face from all angles.
- Everyone always wants me to hurry up and rush to the prize booth immediately, so that I can stand there and wait for 15 minutes while they decide how to spend their 60 or whatever tickets.
- Apparently, attemping to smash buttons into their mounts, wrench joysticks from their sockets, slam steering wheels against their stops, stomp pedals into the floor, and snap gear-shifters out of their gates makes you better at the game. Also, letting a light gun drop to the floor instead of putting it back into its holster when you're done makes you cool.
- On-screen error messages, pitch-black monitors, dead-silent speakers, unlit buttons/marquees, and half-taken-apart game components won't stop people from putting money into a game. I once had a kid put tokens into a motorcycle game that was sitting halfway across the room from its monitor.
- Everyone always asks, "do you work here?"...which is confusing, because I can't think of anyone who would willingly wear a bright red Namco polo shirt with their name on it, tucked into black slacks, unless they were getting paid to. Also, it doesn't matter if I have my hands crammed halfway up the ass of a game, working on fixing something -- they'll still ask. "Do you work here?" "No, I'm just stealing some parts for my computer at home."
- The more tickets someone brings up to the prize booth, the more likely they are to whittle away at their total by asking for nothing but small prizes.
- The ticket/prize booth gives people some sense of security, or something -- actually approaching an employee to ask for something is an impossibility. The employee must always, always go to the booth, even if the customer just wants change from the cash that the employee had in their pocket to begin with.
- The perfect time to go up to the prize booth and turn in your tickets is 15-30 seconds after the last person is done turning in their tickets. This way, you can trick the attendant on duty into thinking they're done dealing with the ticket booth for a while, and piss them off.
- The following math equation is too difficult for 90% of my customers. No joke: 30 - 10 = ?
- No matter how polite someone is when redeeming their tickets for candy, most, if not all of the wrappers will end up on the floor before they leave.
- You could make a sign using letters that each take up a square foot, put blinking lights behind and around it, and set it up right in front of the entrance to the store so that people would have to walk around it to get in...and no one would read it.
So why do I still work there? Well, someone has to do the job, and I'm pretty damned efficient by this point. Besides, I enjoy fixing games, my manager is more of a friend than a supervisor (in other words, my job security is air-tight), I can play all the games I want for free (but not while on-duty), and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, if I'm not helping a customer or fixing a game, I'm pretty much just standing around doing nothing. Plus, making fun of our customers behind their backs makes dealing with them almost tolerable.
Of course, if I could take all of our ticket games, chop them up, and burn them in a giant bonfire, I'd be much happier.
And yes, it can be slow at times. Business tend to come in waves though, where I'm at.
