When I was 16 my mom encouraged me to get a part time job. At first I thought it was because she wanted me to learn real life values and lessons. Nah, she simply wanted to garnish my wages like some sort of parental government entity. When other 16 year old kids were learning how to drive, I was learning the meaning of extortion. Thanks, mom.
The only place dumb enough to hire me was Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Minimum wage child barf clean-up! APPLY TODAY!
For those of you who don’t have kids or still live under a rock, Chuck E. Cheese’s is a babysitting-pizza-serving-germ-infested indoor playground for children. Parents eat stale pizza while their rug-rats run around playing games and getting tickets to trade for toys assembled in a sweatshop by an all female Asian crew suffering from vertigo and heat exhaustion (American consumerism at it’s finest!). To make matters worse, some schmuck in the CEC corporate hierarchy thought it would be wise to grant Chuck E. Cheese’s their liquor license. 100’s of screaming kids and a bunch of drunk adults? Welcome to my own private Hell. This was my first foray into ‘the real world’.
On my first day of work the managers realized how fucking clueless I was. I could barely wipe my own ass or cook microwaved dinners without burning down the kitchen, so they kept me away from anything cooking or fire related. My first task was to clean the bathrooms. When you mix greasy food with a bunch of hyperactive children, you get explosive diarrhea, vomit, rancid piss, and other bodily excrement. Kids aren’t known for their hygiene, so the bathrooms resembled a Tijuana porta-potty after Cinco De Mayo. I definitely earned my $5.75/hr.
When I was 16 I was happy, jovial and completely fucking naive to the world. When the managers realized I would gleefully clean up shit, they figured I’d be good management material (he cleans up shit and doesn’t complain? PROMOTE HIM!). A month later they found some other sucker to scoop up the poo/vomit extravaganza and moved me over to hosting birthday parties for a quarter more per hour. BALLIN’!!! This required me to wear bicycle shorts, tuck in my little red polo and wear a dinky visor. My scrawny, hairless chicken legs resembled something that should be grilling on the deep fryer, not doing the ‘Chuck E shuffle’ in front of a couple dozen mortified children and their parents. I would get on stage and lead all the little hellions by singing the birthday song to whichever ever little bastard fuck-child was born that day. To say I lost my dignity would imply that I actually had some in the first place. While my football player friends were out getting drunk and banging the perky breasted cheerleaders on a Saturday night, I was dancing around in front of a 100 screaming children completely embarrassing myself for tips. Welcome to the teenage version of Life As Nick… *sigh*.

Me after work.
Sundays were especially difficult. Erik, the guy who usually would dress up as Chuck E, wouldn’t show up for work or he’d stumble in like three hours late. Like most 16 year old guys on a Saturday night, he was out getting drunk with his friends. When he wouldn’t show up the managers would run to me in a frenzy, “NICK, WE NEED A CHUCK-E! CUT THE SONG AND DANCE STUFF SHORT AND GO CHANGE! By the way, nice legs!”. Getting into the Chuck E uniform took about 10 minutes. I had a cramped closet to get changed in and sometimes the lighting wouldn’t work. I would get dressed in the dark and cuss out God for bestowing me with such a crappy first job. The suit itself was about 40lbs and on hot days it was like being in a 115° furnace. Welcome to Hell, population: me.
I’d come out and all the kids would run up and tackle me. Some kids were very nice and loving. The rest of them were evil personified x10. They thought it would be funny to punch Chuck E in the stomach (which was my groin), and/or pull Chuck E’s arms and legs with their Thundercat strength. This would always result in a ‘wardrobe malfunction’. I could assemble a better Chuck E costume using my McGyver skills with paper plates, paper clips, and paper towels. Back in 1999 when I worked at Chuck E. Cheese, Chuck E had a tail. Chuck E no longer has a tail. The little Mexican children that would frequent my establishment thought it was a good idea to step on Chuck E’s tail while he was doing the ‘Chuck E shuffle’, thus ripping a gargantuan hole in the back of the suit and causing me to tumble over in my 115° coffin. My last words were, “OHH FUCK!!“, which I was later told by my manager as, “inappropriate language around small children”.
Fucking kids.
On slow days the managers asked the most sober team members to clean up some of the game machines and toys. Every single one of us would rush to the ball-pen, regardless. That place was a treasure chest of freebies!

No one cleans these balls.
Every day some little kid would play in the ball-pen and start screaming bloody murder. Like clockwork, their parents would climb in and triumphantly rescue their children. Of course, they had no idea their children pissed, shat, and barfed all over the balls. With all the colorful spheres of fun, no one really noticed. Nor did anyone notice daddy’s wallet slip out of his back pocket, either. We would find (among other more undesirable findings), purses, watches, wedding rings, a toupee, a wild field mouse that was feeding on a crusty mozzarella stick, and countless cell phones. There was so much bacteria swimming in our ball-pen that I was worried the Center For Disease Control would shut us down and declare our location as a contaminated bio-hazard site. That didn’t stop us from diving in and finding wallets–wallets that were always missing only cash for some reason… I plead the fifth.
Finally, after a year of getting physically abused, insulted (kids would literally tell me to go fuck myself. Seriously), parents would claim I overcharged them constantly and constant complaints (“the pizza tastes like a moldy scrotum”, “who was Chuck E. and why did he slap my daughter?”, “why do the tables smell like barf?”, etc), I finally submitted my resignation. I was making side money at my high school by selling my mom’s anti-depressant pills to the rich Christian kids, so why the fuck would I submit myself to a weekend of punishment at Chuck E. Cheese’s when I could get drunk with the football team and fuck cheerleaders all weekend? The choice for me was simple: I’d rather sell illegal narcotics @ my school then work a legitimate job for minimum wage… and, of course, fuck horny teen cheerleaders.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Take your fucking kids to the park. If you bring them to Chuck E. Cheese you’ll bring them home with more diseases then a leper colony. No one washes the balls. The pizza is usually cooked by an ex-con and as a condition of his parole, he must not step foot on the sales floor near any small children. The managers are all wishing their BA in Business was better spent on something else, and each one of the teenage employees are so fucking miserable that they spend their gratuity on charcoal filtered Vodka to drown out the incessant screaming and crying of small children that plagues them non-stop.
If people wonder why I dislike children, this is why. Try working with other people’s kids for minimum wage. You’ll grow a healthy disdain for anything that crawls out of a vagina and cries/whines/throws a tantrum. Trust me ladies and gents, they only get worse as they get older. I think every single guy needs to work at Chuck E. Cheese’s to realize why wearing a condom and force-feeding your cock princess birth control pills are imperative.
Sometimes I wish I was sterile. Thank you, Chuck E. Cheese’s.
[ ADDENDUM: Oh yeah. All the money I made that I didn't blow on Vodka, my mom put in a bank account for me. I saved $1,200 to be used for my first car. Well, my mom used it for bills and rent. When I was 17 and planning a trip to a prospective college, I asked my mom for my money so I could buy a car and go to L.A. to schedule college interviews. She politely told me that all my money evaporated like a fart in a hurricane. I spent an entire year dealing with those evil little fuckers for... NOTHING??!! Now I'm bitter and hate kids with nothing to show for it. Once again, thanks mom! ]
















