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Idiot Ride Ops.


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At Six Flags Marine World on V2 the main ride operator was doing her makeup and hair, then sent a few text messages. Meanwhile the other ride op was jumping over the barriers in and out of the ride area. Dread to think what would have happened had he tripped.

 

At Alton Towers on Spinball Whizzer the ride ops were just chatting and didn't check or push down lap abrs including my own. I'd only pulled it down a couple of clicks to prove a point that they weren't doing their jobs properly. As soon as they walked away I pulled it down myself.

 

At Cedar Point whilst crouching to lift up the lap bar to get on Gemini the ride op shut the air gates without warning and it caught my leg, trapping it. It took a lot of shouting to get any ride op to notice and release the air gates. No appology was made. I had some nasty bruising and couldn't put much weight on it. Even guest services made no apology. I'd expected more from Cedar Fair.

 

I regularly see ride ops playing with their mobile phones or just not watching the ride at all. I know the majority of ride ops are sensible and take their job seriously but you only need a few bad ones to cause problems.

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I saw an op at SFKK find a dollar in one of the seats of Greezed Lightnin'. Overcome with joy, he began to shout, "I got a dollar. I got a dollar. I got a dollar," while he loudly banged his height-checking stick on the ground.

 

This display, of course, gave me great confidence in this kid's ability to keep me safe.

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Almost every Six Flags I've been to I see a ride op either talking on his/her cell phone and doing as little as possible.

 

We had an op on Hurler at Carowinds that was so annoying. He would act like he was a DJ or something and try "scratching" to the music by pushing the talk button to the rhythem of the song on at the time. Then he'd go on and on about how cute and gorgeous he was.

 

I'm glad rides are run by computer there days.

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Almost every Six Flags I've been to I see a ride op either talking on his/her cell phone and doing as little as possible.

 

We had an op on Hurler at Carowinds that was so annoying. He would act like he was a DJ or something and try "scratching" to the music by pushing the talk button to the rhythem of the song on at the time. Then he'd go on and on about how cute and gorgeous he was.

 

I'm glad rides are run by computer there days.

 

Yeah, the computer safety systems are obviously the main thing keeping us safe. But, think of rides with powerful ejector air, like El Toro. In that case, an idiot op not properly checking a lapbar could result in a terrible accident.

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To some degree, safety is in the eye of the beholding park. For example, at Holiday World, ride ops regularly leap across the track (in the station). In fact, it's part of their procedure! Of course, any op that did that at Cedar Point would be fired on the spot, no questions asked.

 

Also, one must be careful not to confuse unsafe behavior with bad (park) policy. A previous poster mentioned ops that made him go around through the queue again despite an empty train. And while he didn't mention any specific park, I can almost guarantee that the park is making the ops do that for safety reasons.

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Six Flags St. Louis. 2004 Batman crew. Absolutely horrible. First, I wait 20 minutes in line. While waiting in line, a few teens are goofing around and one of them throws a coke bottle on the nearby Scenic Railroad tracks. One of the crew members makes the guest go on the train tracks and get it themselves. So I get up to the station and what do I see? The crew is bouncing basket balls across the platform. Instead of checking the restraints quickly and sending the train, they spent 3-4 minutes checking restraints while bouncing basket balls.

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While in line for Silver Comet a few years back, a brilliant ride op decided that the proper way to release a stuck lapbar on the PTC train was to STICK HER HAND INSIDE the mechanical part of the train. A bar locked on her hand and she started screaming for help. Yeah, that was pretty dumb...

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1. All of the Ride Ops working at Le Monstre in La Ronde were on their cell phones, moving really slowly because they had to text. That is the reason the queue line was clocked at 2 hours that day. I realized after riding that the 2 hour wait wasn't worth the credit. What a credit monger I am!

 

2. Gwazi's ride op was checking every single person to make sure that their lap bar would go down as far as possible. He pushed too hard on a larger man, causing the man to have a panic attack. So, they released everyone's restraints, started over and the the op did the same thing again. This continued for two more times and after about 20 minutes of Gwazi's Tiger sitting while Lion had gone through about 12 times, they got the train out of the station-after that, the same train stopped on the lift and they closed down Tiger for the rest of the day. Too bad I was next in line to get on...

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Probably all the ride ops at MT. Olympus. The worst incident I can remember was on Zeus. My lap bar goes down only one click and won't go down further. I tell the ride op as she goes around to make sure everyone is secure, but she just sends the train on its way. While the airtime was some of the most extreme I've experienced, the ride could have ended in disaster if a small kid had the seat.

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At USH, the ride o for Mummy was a bit... lax when it came to restraint-checking. I figured this out about on my second ride, and then kept my lap bar "three clicks above stapled" on average. My record was five. Seriously, I could be injured, but it was fun, seeing if they noticed that my lap bar was much lower when I returned than when they dispatched it. (I would click it down while waiting to unload.)

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While in line for Silver Comet a few years back, a brilliant ride op decided that the proper way to release a stuck lapbar on the PTC train was to STICK HER HAND INSIDE the mechanical part of the train. A bar locked on her hand and she started screaming for help. Yeah, that was pretty dumb...

 

Ha ha ha... I used to work at Martin's Fantasy Island... I have no comment about the safety training we received.

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August 2006, Mt Olympus, Opa. Both of these girls were working when I rode, just prior to taking this photo. I guess the operator's console doubles as the employee breakroom.

 

Later at Hades, a couple of brilliant riders exited on the wrong side of the train after their ride. Instead of stepping back through the car they walked around behind the train and stepped down onto the track to cross to the exit. Due to the language barrier, all the Ride Op could muster was something to the effect of "do you grow up in the jungle?".

 

Almost every employee I heard speaking at Mt Olympus (as well some other businesses in the Dells area) seemed to speak Russian much better than English.

opa2z.jpg.b134835286f0fec4fd07dd1cb122888a.jpg

"I go on BRRREK!"

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