Upchuck E. Cheese

This is a repeat post. I discovered it recently, in my archives. I’d totally forgotten that I’d written this.. and when I saw it, I bust laughing like all get-out. i read it to my kids- this is definitely VERY motivating for them: study hard and get a good job, kids, or you’ll wind up suffering the afflictions of a job as a costumed mouse in a crazy restaurant…

After I graduated from high school, I moved to Philadelphia, PA, to live with my pen pal. (I was pretty nervy as a kid). I knew no one in that city, just the pen pal. We worked together at Chuck E. Cheese, in North Philly.

It was AWFUL.

I HATED IT.

(And she got to go to Live Aid while I had to work her shift :-p)

I’m not the waitress-type, anyway. If customers are snotty or rude, I stare down at them with the *look* and say something like, “Why don’t you get a life?!” So the manager discovered very quickly that he’d probably lose a lot of money unless he got me away from the tables real quick-like. He put me in charge of the Kids’ Arcade clean-up. Which meant that at the end of the day, I had to do yukky stuff like dive in the Ball Crawl to hunt for lost diapers and shoes, and other…. various stuff. And we sprayed the balls every night with germ-killer. You can guess why.

I HATED working there.

And the boss also made me dress up like Chuck E. Cheese. THAT was excruciating, people. Nasty little brats the size of cubed Swiss cheese punched me, yanked my tail, and bashed their cups on my head. I couldn’t do a stinkin’ thing about it, except fume angrily underneath that enormous mask. I must have lost 20 pounds in water weight that summer, stifled by the heat of the costume and my fumes of rage.

So when I saw this headline, I snickered so loud it brought the kids downstairs to ask what was so funny.

Conduct at Chuck E. Cheese described as ‘madness’

The wobbly video shows a group of adults mulling inside Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant in Susquehanna Twp. Suddenly it pans left and captures a fight breaking out.

The 22-second clip, uploaded Sunday to YouTube, is the latest example of what police describe as a disturbing and bizarre crime trend: escalating violence among adults at a place designed for children’s birthday parties.

So these are parents beating each other. And at Chuck E. Cheese’s in Pennsylvania, no doubt. But… when I was at Chuck E. Cheese, it was the kids who were violent little devils. That’s it! Those nasty gremlins GREW UP and became parents! And these parents returned to the restaurants! It’s a vicious cycle!

“It’s madness, absolute madness,” Susquehanna Twp. Police Chief Robert A. Martin said.

Martin said he believes much of the violence stems from ongoing disputes among people who bump into each other in the restaurant. “They see each other at Chuck E. Cheese, and before you know it an argument turns into something physical.”

The assaults also could be attributed to separated or divorced parents who attend a child’s birthday party, he said. Such was the case in an April 4 incident, when police accused a man of slapping his estranged wife in the head at their child’s party.

The violence at Chuck E. Cheese’s isn’t isolated to the Susquehanna Township restaurant. Last month, the Wall Street Journal published an article about a growing number of adult melees at locations in Brookfield, Wisc.; Topeka, Kan.; Toledo, Ohio; and Flint, Mich.

I don’t know what it is about Chuck E. Cheese that brings out the insane violence in people. Maybe it’s because it’s the uber-rich people with their snotty kids or something? Or maybe it’s that lousy smiling mouse that just makes you want to punch something. I’ve never been on the customer side at Chuck E. Cheese’s, but the employee side was enough to make me foam at the mouth, even after 25 years….

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