(I’m with my family at Hershey Park for the day. It is also my youngest sister’s tenth birthday. As part of her gift, I got her a small hair ornament that looks like a tiara that says, “Happy Birthday.” We have just finished a tour, and at the end an elderly man is handing out small Hershey bars — one for each person.)
Man: *squinting at my sister’s tiara* “What does that say?”
Me: “‘Happy Birthday.’”
Man: “How old are you today?”
Sister: “Ten!”
(The man proceeds to slowly count out and perfectly line up ten chocolate bars, then pushes them toward my sister.)
Man: *smiling* “Don’t tell anyone I did this. This is on behalf of Mr. and Mrs. Hershey. They would want you to have this on your birthday.”
(One of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen!)
I am one of two people who work at an ice cream shack in a water park. This is my third and my coworker’s second year working there. We are the only workers trained on ice cream, so we are both here almost every day. Though I am not paid at the supervisor level, I have been there longer than most employees and have most of the duties of a supervisor.
I already know this summer is going to be a difficult one when I speak to the owner about the conditions of my hiring. He is perfectly agreeable and responsive, until I bring up the subject of my receiving a raise, since it’s my third summer and I’m still being paid minimum wage — $7.25 an hour. I finally finagle a $0.50 raise out of him, which is good enough for me, and am excited to come back to work.
The season gets off to a rocky start due to an unusual amount of inclement weather, but the park is by no means struggling. One slow day, my coworker decides to make a cute little sign for our tip jar. I don’t think anything of it until the owner comes over and begins to berate us about it. He rants on about how tacky it is and he’ll take away our tip jar if we don’t remove the sign. He’s rather rude about it and the whole situation leaves a bad taste in both our mouths. Thankfully, we get to keep our tips, but we’re a lot more careful about how we behave around the owner.
Summer ends, we both go back to school, and I don’t think any more of it. Then, in September, my mom sends me a post from the water park’s Facebook page. Apparently, the owner was caught embezzling from investors and all his funds were pulled. He decided to make himself the victim by handcuffing himself to the top of the flume slide and refusing to leave until people had helped him raise enough money to keep the park. Of course, once the truth was out, nobody wanted to help him and he conceded in less than a week. The park was sold to another group better at not stealing from investors, and it went through a heavy rebranding process, but neither I nor my former coworker plan on going back any time soon.
My roommate and I are exploring a Florida theme park with lots of country-themed pavilions. In the Norway pavilion, we discover a little building holding an exhibit on “Gods of the Vikings.” Being big mythology nerds, we happily enter and are checking out the artifacts and stories of Odin, Freya, Thor, and Loki when another group comes in behind us.
The next thing we hear is an incredibly bubbly and excited voice saying, “Oh, wow! So Marvel didn’t just make these guys up!”
We exchange a single horrified look and nope right on out of there.
(I have the greatest boss ever. He is over seventy years old and has owned and run part of a theme park for about forty years. I am driving the tourist train fully loaded with people up a very steep hill, and have to stop in the middle because someone has left a wheelbarrow right in my path. After the wheelbarrow is moved, I can’t get the train moving again, since it is full of people and going up a steep hill.)
Me: *calling my boss, slightly stressed out* “I can’t get the train up the hill!”
Boss: “It’s all right. Just ask everyone to get off and walk up the hill, and then drive the train up when it’s empty so they can get on again at the top of the hill. I’m sending [Coworker] to help you.”
(At the end of that day, he is comforting me because I thought I had really messed up when I got the train stuck:)
Boss: “A lot of people have gotten stuck on that uphill with the train, actually. I got stuck there in the seventies when I was driving Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. But I just asked them to get out and walk up, and they thought it was fun!”
(That turned out to be true!)
(I love my family to death, but a lot of my relatives are extremely racist and homophobic. This has always upset me because I’ve seen a few cousins’ interracial relationships crack under the pressure from my extended family, and one cousin in particular has confided in me that he is gay, but will never come out to our “close” family. One day we’re on a huge family holiday — we don’t take holidays apart from each other because we’re so close — in Disneyworld and see a lesbian couple in wedding-style Star Wars costumes; they’ve obviously just gotten married.)
Uncle: “I want to go ask them who the husband is.”
Brother: “Definitely the one with the short hair. The other one is prettier.”
Me: *yells across the way* “CONGRATULATIONS! LOVE IS LOVE!”
(The newlyweds smiled, and my family gave me the cold shoulder for a while. Worth it.)
