Its after 2am and I just now got home from work. Saturday night I was back at the Matterhorn for one of those Mmm Mmm good 6pm to 1am shifts. Now the park closed at midnight so when you are off at 1, you usually have to do a lost and found run, but you are still ready to clock out and now that I live closer to the park, I expect to be home at 1. So why was I over an hour late? Pull up a chair and take a bite out of that donut.
I should have known I was in for a rough night when I bumped into rotation, and the first position I got was grouper. Normally, I like to ease into work with a nice cushy spot like Tower or Turnstile, but no, I was thrown to the lions at the get-go. Grouping is a challenge, but grouping on a Saturday is extra special. I don’t know what it is about people who come to the park on Saturday (apologies in advance to anyone out there who does), but most of the guests are slow and really stupid. They also tend to travel in packs of 6 or 10, making the task of filling a sled that much harder. When you group during the week, it is not nearly as difficult.
So the evening passes along pretty uneventful, with the most excitement coming from guests who are too large to fit in the seatbelt, macho guys not wanting to straddle each other, and the occasional guest who gets some personal item tangled in the seatbelt so that they can’t get out of the ride. All of this changed at 11:52. Less than an hour before, Katie and I were in the break room discussing how dull the evening went and how fun it would be to have a downtime to break up the routine. Well it just goes to show you be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
So at 11:52, as I am giving Jose a bad time about time going slowly, the lights on the station console go out. Basically, something was tripped (usually a sensor somewhere in the mountain does something funky and the computer as a safeguard kills all the power). Needless to say, Katie and I exchanged glances, and personally, I started to laugh. It took us about 45 minutes to get everyone out of A-Side and then we had to get B-Side ready to send the remaining line of people who waited in the queue, even after the park closed. After cycling all the guests through, we had to reset the bad side to get all the sleds down. In the middle of that, we got another E-Stop, forcing us to start over. Finally, around 1:30 we had everything ready to turn over to Maintenance for the night. I didn’t mind staying the extra hour, I’m just glad we were able to put the guests on another track. Otherwise we’d still be there.
During lunch, I picked up my new schedule. It is bizarre that I only have a Pooh guest control shift with the rest Matterhorn and Routes. I guess now all the high seniority people are over there and lucky me, I’ll be back at the Matterhorn all summer. I really don’t mind, I just go where I’m needed. I’m just glad I’m not stuck only at the Routes. I’ve always maintained that the best schedule is a mixed one with a little bit of everything mixed up. Later this morning, its off to Pooh GC. It should be fun and a nice kick back shift.