My Life As A Carny

On Saturday, I was a volunteer at my agency's Multi-Cultural Arts Festival running carny games that were free for children. The event also featured free food - which means people popped out of the wood work to get in on this action and we had close to 300 attendees. JKR and two of my friends also volunteered to help and had they not been there, I would have been crushed to death in a stampede of 8-year-olds fighting for control of bean bags and magnetic darts. Not only were the games free, but we were also giving out free prizes. I'm lucky to be alive.

I've often fantasized about life as a carny - taking tickets and making dreams come true for at least 45-55 seconds. However, for about five hours, my head was a moving target. If I was too slow in retrieving bean bags or darts for the games - my booth was swarmed as kids "helped" by grabbing things out of my hands or re-setting the games so they could continue to play "knock down the goblin head" before I even had a chance to get out of the way. I tried banning kids that hit me in the face with things, but I didn't know exactly who I was banning and some of them were actually bigger than me. It was like this:

THWAP (the sound the beanbags made hitting my face)
"Who was that? You're banned! Banned from this game! Go play at the ice cream truck!"

THWAP
"HEY!"

THWAP
"Godda--"
THWAP

"I need a drink. Why aren't hysterectomies elective surgery?"

When the trail of little kids died down, I started setting up slightly more competitive rounds with the older kids who wouldn't leave and go play with anything else - which was a mistake. I'd have them do distance shots - which means they were turning on the rocket arm, but they had crappy aim, so I was getting hit harder than I would have had they stayed at a distance of 3 feet. My bad.

Observations:
Kids pick their noses a lot. You're so little, how much could be up there?
Parents of naughty children are surprisingly open to leaving those kids unattended or with complete strangers.
People tend to get a strong sense of entitlement and elevated grabby behaviors where free stuff is concerned.

A co-worker was passing out bottles of Poland Spring water - for free - to attendees. One woman said "Oh, do you have any smaller bottles? This is too big for my grandson," which translates to "Oh, I see you are giving out free stuff, do you have any better free stuff than this?"