It’s basically a rite of passage to have a quirky job as a teen.

You’ve got no job history, no recommendations, so wherever will hire you is the place you go, for the experience as much as the cash.

So understandably, the guy in this story was happy to take on a job at a theme park, even with all the responsibility a ride operator role entailed.

He took it seriously and was good at it – but when poor management led to a near-disaster, he was almost forced to shoulder the blame.

Read on to find out what happened when he dutifully observed the pointless protocols management implemented in reaction, and how it backfired on them.

If a single radio’s battery dies, shut it all down

Five years ago, I was seventeen years old, and working at a big theme park.

I had been working there for the better part of the year. I had quickly picked things up, and was usually regarded as the responsible one on the team, when it was just a bunch of us teens working a ride.

We had a college student intern lead who was… not good at leading, or training new hires.

Let’s call him M.

Let’s see how this team operated.

My main ride required three people minimum to operate: one person in the control booth, one at the entrance gate, and one at the exit.

However, we could have four or five if we were incredibly busy, to help deal with the line.

The people in the booth and at the entrance could not see the person at the exit directly, so we used radios. The control booth also had a camera on the exit gate.

From day one on the job, we were taught hand signals in case the radio dies or for quick communication; these signals were universal across the entire park.

But serious errors kept occurring in the park.

That summer, three freshly certified kids (we had to take tests to prove we paid attention to training) started the ride with someone locked inside the fence (not in a seat).

Twice it was another employee, once it was a guest (which was a HUGE deal).

The thing with those incidents was that those in the control booth didn’t notice their mistake until the others screamed at them to hit the emergency stop.

Those new hires were either retrained or moved to a simpler ride.

Then one day, something unusual happened.

One incredibly busy day, there were five of us running things: me, M, and three others.

M had been called over to another ride, which normally wasn’t an issue. But about an hour later, someone was scheduled to go home, and M hadn’t come back yet.

I called the other ride and asked them to send him back. We could’ve run things with three of us, but it was super busy and we really needed a fourth.

A few minutes later, someone (not our lead) was sent over to take over. Weird, but no big deal.

And when M still didn’t return, this guy had to take matters into his own hands.

Another hour or so went by and someone else needed to go home, so I called again asking for M. Also, all the radios’ batteries were dead/dying.

Things had slowed down so I, being the spare fourth person, took the radios to the office to get fresh batteries. This took less than 10 minutes, and in that time, the guys had switched to hand signals as we were trained.

When I came back, our lead had once again sent over someone else to take his spot. At this point, I realized that M was probably just shooting the **** in the nice air-conditioned booth at the other ride.

Uh-oh. Let’s see what happened with the new employee who came over.

Now the guy that got sent over to us was normally at a rollercoaster and hadn’t been at this ride in over a month, so I gave him a quick review and he took controls.

I turned around for maybe thirty seconds when I heard yelling.

I turned around, and the ride was stopped maybe three feet off the ground with our entrance guy locked in the fence.

The guy at controls saw what he did and hit the emergency stop, something that the other screwups that summer did not think to do.

Yikes! Read on to find out what happened next.

We had to call upper management, and wouldn’t ya know? M came running over! This time the highest of the higher ups came over as well.

They pulled each of us aside and interrogated us (which was odd) then walked away and talked for like half an hour. They then fired the guy at controls on the spot, and came up with reasons to get the rest of us removed from running rides.

They absolutely were only doing that to make an example of us.

I tried to rip into M for shirking his duties, but as an anxiety-ridden kid it didn’t hit very hard. I was mainly mad that they fired the poor guy who never should have been there in the first place.

But in the end, management turned the blame on the wrong person.

Remember I took the already dead radios earlier? They tried to say I had ‘removed communication devices from the ride area’ which prevented them from letting controls know they were outside the gate.

They were basically trying to pin the whole thing on me. Total rubbish, because this happened after I brought them back.

I assume M threw me under the bus for being ‘in charge’ while he wasn’t there. Also, we had hand signals!!! I tried explaining that to them, but they didn’t care.

I refused to sign the paperwork which would be admitting fault, so this fight was stretched over multiple days. Plus I was leaving for college in like two weeks, and didn’t want to spend my last days of summer cleaning bathrooms.

With this pinned on the radios, management came up with nonsensical new protocols.

They gave us a new rule: if a single radio was dying, we had to call a manager to fetch us a new battery, even if we had people to spare to go grab one instead. If a radio died, we had to close the ride.

Managers roamed around the whole area and were responsible for so much, so if you called them and it wasn’t urgent, it could take a long time for them to show up.

The next day, my radio was dying, so I called the manager. Half hour went by, and I call again.

Then my radio died, so I shut down the ride.

And that consequence had massive repercussions.

The people in the over-an-hour line got super mad, so I explained to them that we had to close because of the radios. Naturally, they got even more annoyed because of how stupid that was.

A manager showed up minutes later. I took the battery from him with a smile on my face and he left without saying a word – and inevitably, after many complaints, management was magically fine with us using hand signals again!

I never signed that paperwork, I left for college, and funny enough, M also went to the same college. I ran into him once, he just kinda nodded at me, I gave him a dirty look, and I never saw him again.

The next summer, I was rehired by the park as a lead and actually did my damn job.

The way that management chose to redistribute blame from the actual cause (poorly trained kids being sent to rides they weren’t familiar with) to something as arbitrary as the radios is absolutely wild.

But for people who are happy to scapegoat someone who was forced to work on a ride they weren’t familiar with, instead of querying why M wasn’t actually with the ride he should have been supervising, this shouldn’t really be a surprise.

They made an example of the wrong person, and this was the least of the red flags flying high in this workplace.

Let’s see how the Reddit community reacted to this.

This person thought that the lack of protocols around the clearly unreliable batteries was crazy.

While others were shocked that the employee went back for another year.

This Redditor, meanwhile, thought this was typical of theme park employers.

It’s so clear that management don’t value their employees, and they certainly don’t respect them.

Nor are they so hot on the health and safety of the theme park guests. Sure they leap into action when something goes wrong, but prevention is better than cure and better management of employees would prevent many of these situations in the first place.

And firing someone to make an example of them is not good employee management. Nor is it moral or even legal.

It’s an absolute disgrace.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.