Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Fun at Chuck E. Cheese

Any kid knows that Chuck E. Cheese is the bomb.

Any adult knows that Chuck E. Cheese is torture. So here is a fun way to entertain yourself at Chuck E. Cheese (or other such establishments)

No doubt, the thing that kids love the most about these places are the plethora of crappy prizes, worth $2, that they can win with those tickets the won by feeding all those games $20 of your money.

Used to be that the prize counter employee would count all those tickets, but that proved to be inefficient. Soon these places started just weighing the tickets. 50 Tickets = 1oz. (or whatever the number is).

Of course the weighing scheme was tragically flawed, as kids who were smarter then the employees (not too hard to find) figured out that wet tickets weigh more. So, off the little treasures would go to the restroom to wet their tickets, and suddenly 35 tickets = 1oz. So their 35 tickets will buy 50 tickets worth of booty.

I don't see how this could be a money loosing proposition for these places. They charge $40 for a Pizza, which really ends up costing you $45 when you factor in the antacid, then you spend another $20 on tokens to get $2.50 worth of Dollar Store trinkets that are sure to break in about 10 minutes, causing 20 minutes of crying.

Anyway, along came the best idea ever....


The ticket counting machine.

So this basically works like so: You get a bunch of tickets, feed them to the machine, it counts them for you and prints out a nice little piece of paper telling you how many tickets you have "won".

This does leave a small problem for the prize counter employee. You see, generally the kids will win a handful of tickets, get a printout, then go spend another handful of quarters. At the end of this adventure your little treasures end up with 5 or 6 of these slips. So here is the problem. How in the world is the prize counter employee to cope with having to add 34, 56, 92 and 147?

You will notice, at every prize counter, a simple calculator for performing such complex feats of mathematics.

Ok, so where is the fun in this? Get ready for it. This is the most fun thing for an adult to do at such an establishment. This takes some time, but I am sure you will find it well worth the effort when you see the effect.

When the kids come back to "Home Base" with their bounty of tickets, you simply take the tickets over to "the machine" and feed it one. Then press print. Then feed it another, and press print again, and again, and again... Yeah it takes some time, but the look on the face of the prize counter employee when you walk up to the counter with a stack of 253 slips of paper, With 1 ticket printed on each is really worth it.

Have fun with that.

1 comment:

  1. you are one sick pirate, mister -- notice i don't go with you to such places?? there'd be a reason and it isn't that the stopped selling overpriced crap beer.

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