Shadow of the Cyclone
Well. I now learn something new about the ride at Alton Towers for which we spent two hours queuing for, a week or so ago. Once we got off the ride, we noticed that the queue had swelled even further. Poor bastards, we thought, before heading for the bar.
Thirty minutes later, with the queue surely edging toward the two and a half hour mark, the ride threw a gasket and stranded its riders in the sky for the best part of an hour. To compound the torment, as the guests sat jabbering in frustration over the heads of a thousand staring idiots, members of staff scaled the ride and wrapped them in silver thermal clothing, like turkeys dressed for the oven. We have to assume that this was an act of kindness rather than fodder for the ride camera.
After all, this is Alton Towers, and risk is not an option for these people. They are a brand, and for some inexplicable reason, killing off your punters tends to be poison for the image. Modern theme parks are one huge exercise in risk elimination – failsafes, computer control…even the backup sensors have backup sensors.
Not every park is so technologically gifted. A few years ago I worked for a theme park in America, one year after one of their rollercoasters killed a rider. In retrospect, even when I was there, safety was not the first thing in the park owners' minds. Very few of the rides had any way of the ride operator to contact another member of staff – telephones were few and far between, and only senior staff had radios. So if anything went wrong, ka-boom! Helpfully, one of the most important safety guidelines we were given was to never leave a ride unattended under any circumstance. Therefore, if the ride was going nuts and raining fiery bolts down on the guests, so long as you just sat there trying not to die whilst waiting for a supervisor to spot the plumes of smoke, you wouldn't be hauled in front of the managers and beaten.
Meanwhile, the chair-lift – the sort of stripped-down cable car consisting simply of a seat and a safety bar – claimed a few scalps of its own, mine included. The damn thing required the operator to hurry the guests out in front of the chair, squeeze them in, spit out a generic welcome, and yank the safety bar down, hoping that they weren't too damned obese for the ride. (Now there was a conversation you did not want to have.)
It was a swiftly executed procedure and if you were careless you could easily bring the safety bar down and snag a fold of your t-shirt. When it happened to me I was dragged about fifteen feet into the air, holding desperately onto the side of the chair and shouting down at the witless operator on the other side to stop the ride. She was, like most of the American ride operators there, an end-of-season temp who screwed up the job constantly and paid no attention to anything at all except to ensure that they were not struck on the head by their ride. Hey...now I think about it, that isn't an exaggeration. I have a photograph somewhere of one American guy called Luis posing in front of this ride, arms folded in self-satisfaction, precisely one second before a chair came up behind him and walloped him in the back, knocking him face down into the mud. Man alive.
Okay, I have wandered a little here. Anyway, it was only after I had shouted down at her five times that she stopped chewing her gum and responded to my calls to "stop the damn ride!" Soon enough it occurred to her to stop the damn ride. She pulled out the safety cable and the ride shuddered to a halt, allowing me to get a foothold and free myself. I leapt athletically to the ground, and the newly assembled crowd of onlookers offered me an ironic round of applause. I glowered back and went to have a break in peace.
So guests may have it bad, but ride operators can get the rawest deal. If you consider being dragged into the air by a chairlift and dangled like a side of meat on a butcher's hook, being stuck on a British rollercoaster for an hour dressed like an extra from Flash Gordon doesn't seem too bad.
Thirty minutes later, with the queue surely edging toward the two and a half hour mark, the ride threw a gasket and stranded its riders in the sky for the best part of an hour. To compound the torment, as the guests sat jabbering in frustration over the heads of a thousand staring idiots, members of staff scaled the ride and wrapped them in silver thermal clothing, like turkeys dressed for the oven. We have to assume that this was an act of kindness rather than fodder for the ride camera.
After all, this is Alton Towers, and risk is not an option for these people. They are a brand, and for some inexplicable reason, killing off your punters tends to be poison for the image. Modern theme parks are one huge exercise in risk elimination – failsafes, computer control…even the backup sensors have backup sensors.
Not every park is so technologically gifted. A few years ago I worked for a theme park in America, one year after one of their rollercoasters killed a rider. In retrospect, even when I was there, safety was not the first thing in the park owners' minds. Very few of the rides had any way of the ride operator to contact another member of staff – telephones were few and far between, and only senior staff had radios. So if anything went wrong, ka-boom! Helpfully, one of the most important safety guidelines we were given was to never leave a ride unattended under any circumstance. Therefore, if the ride was going nuts and raining fiery bolts down on the guests, so long as you just sat there trying not to die whilst waiting for a supervisor to spot the plumes of smoke, you wouldn't be hauled in front of the managers and beaten.
Meanwhile, the chair-lift – the sort of stripped-down cable car consisting simply of a seat and a safety bar – claimed a few scalps of its own, mine included. The damn thing required the operator to hurry the guests out in front of the chair, squeeze them in, spit out a generic welcome, and yank the safety bar down, hoping that they weren't too damned obese for the ride. (Now there was a conversation you did not want to have.)
It was a swiftly executed procedure and if you were careless you could easily bring the safety bar down and snag a fold of your t-shirt. When it happened to me I was dragged about fifteen feet into the air, holding desperately onto the side of the chair and shouting down at the witless operator on the other side to stop the ride. She was, like most of the American ride operators there, an end-of-season temp who screwed up the job constantly and paid no attention to anything at all except to ensure that they were not struck on the head by their ride. Hey...now I think about it, that isn't an exaggeration. I have a photograph somewhere of one American guy called Luis posing in front of this ride, arms folded in self-satisfaction, precisely one second before a chair came up behind him and walloped him in the back, knocking him face down into the mud. Man alive.
Okay, I have wandered a little here. Anyway, it was only after I had shouted down at her five times that she stopped chewing her gum and responded to my calls to "stop the damn ride!" Soon enough it occurred to her to stop the damn ride. She pulled out the safety cable and the ride shuddered to a halt, allowing me to get a foothold and free myself. I leapt athletically to the ground, and the newly assembled crowd of onlookers offered me an ironic round of applause. I glowered back and went to have a break in peace.
So guests may have it bad, but ride operators can get the rawest deal. If you consider being dragged into the air by a chairlift and dangled like a side of meat on a butcher's hook, being stuck on a British rollercoaster for an hour dressed like an extra from Flash Gordon doesn't seem too bad.
posted by Jamie at 10:45 AM
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