The most unrealistic demand I’ve ever heard came in the form of a flustered mother at the 50th State Fair around 2010 or 2011.
Carnival people are… a very mixed bag. You have people that are just there to have a good time and don’t care about throwing money away to do so, and you have those for whom every wasted dollar is a sin against the holy name of Christ and it’s your fault.
I was running a game called Star Darts. The idea of the game is simple: throw a dart and land it entirely on a red star that’s about the size of a floppy disk. It’s not entirely hard, but the target is a distance away to add challenge.
My coworker had just taken a metal-tipped dart to the shoulder thanks to a child who was way too hyped up on cotton candy and had way too little supervision, so I was running the booth by myself. A large family came up to the booth.
This woman paid for about five kids to get a set of darts. They missed most of them — I think one kid stuck one dart into a star.
The mom, bless her soul, looked crestfallen, but then, she started demanding that I turn off the wind.
I thought she was joking at first, but she was dead serious. She started going off about how the carnival was rigged and we’d designed all the games so that we could manipulate them with the wind.
I showed her that there were no fans in the trailer my game was run out of, but that only made her angrier. I believe her exact words were:
Woman: “I don’t care about g**d*** fans! I want you to get rid of this wind, and I want them to try again!”
I guess they had gone from game to game and they just weren’t having any luck. Unfortunately for her, I hadn’t been… shall we say… trained… in customer service yet, so I couldn’t help but laugh as I reiterated that I had no control over the literal wind.
The woman threw a dart at me. To this day, I do not know how, but I caught it like a frickin’ ninja between my index and ring fingers — literally the coolest thing I’ve ever done on the fly like that, and NO ONE SAW IT.
I called for a supervisor, not fully processing that she had just tried to long-distance stab me. He ended up leading her away and calming her down before coming back to me.
Supervisor: “Was she telling you to turn off the wind?”
Me: “She was.”
Supervisor: “I thought so…”
Me: “Just to be clear… we can’t do that, right?”
Supervisor: “No. No, we can’t.”
Me: “Good to know.”
Supervisor: “Did she throw a dart at you?”
Me: “She did, yeah.”
Supervisor: “Do you want me to do something about that? We can file a report and have her removed. She’s only gone down to Gun Ball.”
Me: “Nah, just do me a favor.”
Supervisor: “Mmm?”
Me: “Get one of the [Fan Brand] blowers from the back and follow her around.”
The supervisor laughed louder than I would have expected.
About an hour later, the woman came back and apologized for her behavior and for snapping and throwing the dart, but she still maintained an implication that I could control the wind.