Most of the family unit went off to Six Flags New England today and I have to say we had a blast. Our oldest son was off to grandma’s house for the day (not his choice…long story), but my wife, my youngest (age 2) and I all went to the amusement park.
There’s not a whole lot for someone that age to actually participate in, but there are some rides accessible to him, and we had already paid for the tickets, and I love roller coasters, so we went.
But I hate lines.
I’m extraordinarily impatient, this is hardly a secret. Since I hadn’t been to the amusement park in about 6 years, I splurged and dropped $80 for the platinum Flash Pass.
A Flash Pass is a little doohickey made by a company called Lo-Q that allows you go virtually stand in line. But it’s so much more. There are three levels:
- Regular: Stands in line for you, but for the same amount of time you might already be stuck there. But you can roam the park in the mean time and it buzzes when it’s your turn to ride.
- Gold: Still stands in line for you, but let’s you jump some undisclosed portion of it, reducing the amount of time you’ll be waiting. Again, you roam, you get buzzed when it’s time.
- Platinum: Let’s you reserve a spot in line and cuts out 90% of the wait time, AND allows you to ride the rides twice consecutively without waiting again.
The cost for these ranges from $31-$80. Guess which one I dropped the money for? [psst...check the title of this post]
Given I was going to split my time between taking the little one on rides and spending time with the family, and also trying to go on some really awesome rides, it was worth the splurge. On average the time between reserving and when I was allowed to arrive for my time was less time than it took me to actually get to the ride. In a phrase, “boo yah.”
I have to say, I was more interested in the time savings, I wasn’t looking for the consecutive riding powers, and I didn’t use them. It’s bad enough to run past all of the folks who’ve been waiting for over an hour in line, jumping in front of them and having your fun. It’s worse to make the folks behind them watch you make them wait even longer.
But it’s an awesome power to have if you want it.
My only complaint, such as it is….only ONE ride operator asked if I was going to take a second trip. The folks over on the Flashback ride asked. So either’s there’s a “learning opportunity” (in HR parlance) for that operating crew, or the rest of the park. The platinum holders are noted by a wrist band issued that show’s you’re one special and well funded guest and he was the only that made note that I had one and inquired as to whether or not I planned to go a second time. My hat’s off to you good Sir, bravo.
That’s not to say I’m knocking the rest of the park staff, they did a great job. One interesting thing I notice far too often, was that every other train on the Bizarro ride was held up when at least one guest had to be ejected from the ride because they didn’t fit inside the restraints. Interestingly, to me at least, most of the folks I observed being shown the exit weren’t necessarily obese. In many cases they simply had stocky football player builds, but weren’t necessarily ‘fat’. The restraints are designed to accommodate x height and y weight, and to keep the occupant safe given the physics of the ride within those constraints. But perhaps Six Flags and ride manufacturer Intamin should embrace the opportunity to develop for a niche market, but hopefully while not being branded as enablers.
Otherwise, we had a fantastic day at the park. The park was clean, most of the other guests were well behaved, and our youngest had a great time on the rides he could partake of. He was quite relieved to see me at the end of the day where I was willing to pick him up and give him a lift back to the car. He was asleep on my shoulder before we got to the car in the parking lot and slept the entire way home.
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One downside of the day….
My wife and I stopped at a McDonald’s on the way home to get an unsweetened ice tea, one of their much touted Caramel Frappe’s, and two McDouble’s as a quick snack since we had eschewed must of the usual amusement park junk food (yay!).
I’m not sure what the complicated part of this order was, but at 6:30 at night you’d think this would be a fairly easy order but alas, it was not. I received my iced tea in a timely fashion, but apparently the McDouble’s and the Caramel Frappe are a complicated thing for McDonald’s employees to construct. I’m a bit confused about this.
The drink is essentially made by a machine which near as I can tell doesn’t even require literacy. From what I can see from the drive through window (thank you corporate level standardized set ups), the worker merely has to push some pictures on the screen to have a drink happen.
The McDouble’s are two slabs of meat with a piece of cheese, ketchup, and some onion bits between bread, and given McDonald’s core business is the hamburger, I was quite astonished that I pushed the employees to new heights with my order, however we found ourselves having to “pull forward to the corner” to wait for our food. It took so long, in fact, that I found myself going inside to find out what the hold up was.
I have to wonder if McDonald’s has gotten a bit ahead of itself with it’s menu and away from the fast food, assembly line, concepts that made it the corporate behemoth that it is. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve actually been to one outlet that has two spaces in their parking lot specially marked with signage for waiting for drive through orders that go awry.
The food’s largely unhealthy anyway, perhaps I should just avoid them. Happily, in recent months I’ve cut way back on my visits.
