It's been some years since I did this but I've haven't seen a review of working at an amusement park from behind the scenes on this site. I spent six seasons as a ride operator at Six Flags Great Adventure and thought I'd share a little bit of what goes on from the other side of the ride console.

What type of training does operating a ride involve? Those are some big pieces of machinery!

In order to work on a ride, first, you had to be hired into ride operations. You'd interview with personnel. Basically, if you wanted to work in rides, it all depended upon whether or not there were openings when you applied and if you had worked in the department in the past. Transfers between departments happen but they are hard to get. It's easiest to be hired straight into operations.

There are other great departments you can work in at Six Flags but I don't have first hand experience with them. My brother, for example, spent ten seasons in Food Service. He worked his way up from a hot dog cart starting at age 15 to a manager to a supervisor and then back down to a manager since managers were paid more. He has just as many wonderful stories to tell (including how he met his wife) but I'll save those so that he can write them down himself.

Getting back to rides.... You had to pass two or three tests. The first two years I worked there, you took a safety test as part of orientation and you received a ride attendant badge. Then, you took a test for your assigned ride and received an operator badge. Starting my third year, you took a safety test in department orientation and reported to your ride where you were immediately trained to become an attendant. You were then sent back to the operations department to take an attendant test that was specific to the ride you worked. Later, you took an operator's test. If you were very trusted and knowledgeable, you might be allowed to take a trainer's test. Only certified trainers are allowed to train other employees. All leads (head operators) and supervisors had to pass training tests.

To train for these tests, the lead or another certified trainer for the ride would take you around the ride and show you everything you needed to know. You'd take an hour or so for a major ride and less for a minor ride to train for your attendant's test. You'd walk back to operations to take the test and then after you had passed (which you did since the leads and trainers were good at their jobs), you'd go back to the ride and work as an attendant for a few days (or longer) on a major ride. For a minor ride, the process was accelerated since there was less to know. Along the way, you'd be training as an operator. At the end of your training period (which varied in length depending upon the complexity of the ride), you'd take an operators test. Once you passed, you were allowed to press the buttons by yourself. Before that, a certified operator had to stand with you in the booth watching you.

In the "olden days", if you were a certified operator for a "major ride" (that is a ride where there are multiple cars or trains ordinarily), you used to be able to both attend and operate any minor or flat ride in the park without any additional tests or training. When they switched certification procedures, you then had to pass attendant and operator tests for each ride in the park that you might work. On the surface, this sounds like a wonderful idea. In practice, many of the flat rides are extremely similar. Operating the Scrambler and the Musik Express doesn't really differ between the rides. Attending at the Carousel is a heck of a lot easier than being an attendant at Rolling Thunder. If you can manage operating a major roller coaster, being an attendant at a minor ride isn't a stretch at all, especially when you see the tests! Of the questions for minor rides, only two or three are actually specific to attending at that ride. The rest are the same questions (such as the procedures on how to use a fire extinguisher and what are the emergency phone numbers) that appear on every test.

Where this comes into play is in staffing. Let's say that the Flying Wave (for example) normally has two people assigned to work there. Someone has to come and work there for at least a couple of hours during a shift to provide breaks. If one operator calls out sick, you need to have someone else to work the ride. From prior first hand experience, it really stinks to be the only person in your section who is cross-certified to be an operator on that particular flat ride. You end up going there almost every day and don't get to stay on your assigned ride. While no one minds being sent away every now and again, it gets old when it's a daily event. You used to see people doing anything in their power not to cross-certify.

In my case, when we were told that we were required to certify on three rides in our section, I was already certified on Freefall so I went out and got certified on two other major rides. This was frowned upon and I was forced to certify on the absolute worst minor ride in the section. I never did certify for it as an operator so at least I wasn't sent quite as often.

What was your favorite ride?

I mostly worked on the Freefall. The ride had a roof so we didn't get wet in the rain so we never had to wear the ugly yellow rain slickers. The ride had a large crew so there was a lot of worker interaction and it boasted a complicated certification test so we had very smart people on the crew because the test was harder to pass. There was a fringe benefit to working the ride called money. Guests lost a lot of change on the ride and that loose change adds up fast. We'd each average between $5 and $15 a night. That change bought a whole bunch of college textbooks! We were located very close to wardrobe so I was usually on time. Walking across the park on a crowded day could take up to half an hour to get to rides like the Log Flume. The ride also had breakdowns on a regular basis. The work was never boring and everyone was well trained in case of a major malfunction. The major drawback was climbing 13 stories of stairs!

Is it difficult working with so many guests each day?

Yes. Guests can either be wonderful or not so wonderful.

We had a sign stating "DO NOT DISTRACT OPERATOR Attendants cannot watch or be responsible for personal articles." When guests would ask us to watch their things, we'd point to the sign and grin. You wouldn't believe how many people would ask you questions while you are operating. Don't they realize that we had the power to KILL them just by pressing a couple of buttons? Don't they want us to be paying attention while THEY are riding the ride? At least there was glass behind the booth if not on the sides and front. Eventually, the sign was taken away from us by management but it worked.

A very difficult job was to stand out in front of the ride when the ride was closed and tell people that the ride is closed. Guests do NOT want to hear this. They paid a lot of money to come into the park and they want to ride each and every ride. I understand this completely. We used to just put a trash can in front of the ride entrance but people would come up the entrance (or the exit) anyway and get very angry. So, someone was stationed there to tell people when the ride would open. Ordinarily, you could ballpark it and say "I'm not really sure but if you were to come back in a couple of hours (or whatever) you'd probably be able to ride then." Just never give them an exact time unless you are certain!

The bad part is when you're down for an extended period of time and you are running the ride empty for testing. Once we had a problem with the ride just stopping and couldn't figure out what was causing it. Management made a decision that the ride would be run with lead weights continuously until the problem was diagnosed. We ran the ride empty for two solid weeks which were the more boring and horrendous days of my employment. Either you are sitting at the panel bored out of your skull or you are at the entrance, explaining to guests that the ride really is broken even though they can see (and hear) it running throughout the entire section of the park. After two weeks with no breakdowns, the ride reopened and we promptly broke down again. It turned out that when it rained, some water was getting into a valve. The two weeks we ran the ride empty were sunny and beautiful with no rain. Of course it didn't break down!

My worst guest experience happened my first day on the job, when I was sent to Kiddie Rides where I ran the kiddie Ferris Wheel and I managed to get a child stuck on there almost immediately. I had a couple dozen people screaming at me and it was one of the most stressful situations I've ever experienced. Kiddie Rides are different than regular rides because they only run when you physically hold down the button. Lift up your finger and the ride stops. I just couldn't get the hang of stopping that Ferris Wheel at the exact spot before it would come to a gliding stop in the proper place. I wasn't sent back to Kiddies very often after that day.

A lot of the fun went out of the job when there was an accident at the park and someone was killed. You realize just how much responsibility you have as an operator and that you literally do have other peoples lives in your hands. It's an awesome responsibility and not one to take lightly. I just wished that some of the guests took it as seriously as I did. I could write for weeks about some of the stupid things that guests did to endanger themselves on the rides.

It sounds like a lot of hard work. Did you ever have fun?

We used to have a lot of fun working on the ride and playing practical jokes on one another. One day, I found a watermelon on my way to the ride. It wasn't a very big watermelon. It was just the right size to fit into our water cooler. The cooler was filled with ice so we were able to cool the watermelon. A co-worker opened the top of the cooler to dip out a cup of water. She saw the watermelon and screamed because she was so shocked. Later that night, we dropped the watermelon off the top of the tower and we thought about filming it for the David Letterman show. Okay, the story isn't that funny in retrospect but at the time, I thought it was hysterical.

The Log Flume was also a lot of fun to work, especially my one day when we had a breakdown where we had boats stuck on the first lift and had to evacuate the ride. Then, some folks from Food Service filled up the run out of the ride with an industrial sized jug of Joy detergent. The entire ride filled up with suds! We were dealing with guest complaints left and right because they were worried about the ducks living in the reservoir pond. Our supervisor told us that we needed to go into the pond and rescue the ducks. Did you know that ducks bite? My friend Phil was bitten in a very painful place by a duck during the rescue mission.

If it's such a great place to work, why did you leave?

I'm glad I worked at Great Adventure when I did it but I was also very happy to leave when I did. It is hard, physical work. You're outside when it's over 100 degrees or when it's only 40 outside. You're standing up on a concrete platform, 80 feet in the air during a lightning storm. It's a young person's job. I started when I was a senior in high school and I left right after graduating from college before I went to graduate school. By the time I left, I was 23 and I felt old and tired. It was strange having 16 year olds as co-workers and the age difference was too large. You're at different stages of your lives. I'd also been there and done that. It was time to move on. Besides, it was time to get a REAL job!


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