i spent a month as a pirate ship operator. february-april, working on the spring holidays, about 4 weeks all told. on my internet with friends i call this pirate reality.
start at 945. end at 445. most days. or 1045. some days. that’s between 6-7 hours. in march i had maybe 2 shifts. i had no other work and no other recourse aside from 60 a week of jobseeker’s allowance. so had to beg for money from family, my partner, and online for rent and an emergency tooth surgery. that’s a reality that interacts with pirate reality and intersects. it’s called poverty. i thank my partner for all their help in this time, they work too, wash my shirts, cook and buy food and we dance together and have fun. i have much love for them.
if you think of the game of pirate ship as a game in a sense of theory, this punctures the ‘magic circle of its own rules’ theory when the operator of the game is in their manner, and appearance, which affect your game, affected by an externality. game piece that is living in multiple realities.
in the first two shifts. i learn the way to operate. during torrential downpours. the ride operation cabin, which sits to the side of the ride, begins to flood. i bail water with a squeegee, away from the electronics.
on every ride there’s space for 24. 4 to a row. the back rows the most popular. a prevailing thought while i work is that i don’t want to be there. i want to be elsewhere. this mainly comes when i have no passengers or when people are annoying enough, and I’m tired enough.
the money and the way that on almost every occasion you bring someone some kind of unalienated joy, is what keeps me there until i find something else. which i do. eventually.
but yes it’s good to see people made happy by your instigation of a physics game for them.
it’s a vessel that swings from side to side, slowly for about the first 4 runs (about 10 secs) then picks up speed until it’s at its highest for about 80 secs and then brakes slow it down to a stop, all powered by a rotating wheel underneath.
people will try to fit more than 4 on a row, and it’s nowhere on the signage that this is the rule. so i have to enforce this. this i do to keep my job. the same with making sure people put their bags on the opposite side of the ride to where they entered. and to staying seated while it’s going. and to not performing acts of antisocial behaviour. and so on…
if someone throws up or has any other kind of spontaneous human waste ejection occur that gets on stuff, that’s a code 4. this doesn’t happen to me. i never have to radio in a coded message.
the ship, about 25 years old, does fail to work on a couple of occasions. mainly its down to human error. me stacking too many heavier people on one side and then trying to make it go, it rolls off centre, then can’t go at all. when this happens, i radio the engineers and they ask me to help once they open up the reset board by pushing this tonne of plastic, metal and human so that it rolls back into position… this hurts. and no-one even says thanks. all three times.
it is nice when someone says thanks. for having them ride. it’s not when someone tries to fight you about one of those rules you ‘have’ to enforce. telling someone no feels good and having the crutch of ‘that’s the rules’ and ‘it’s dangerous’ to rely on makes it easier. part of authoritarianism is how good it feels to normal people to enforce the unconscionable restriction of humanity via escape valves of said ‘authority’ that others may not agree with but are under structural pressure to follow… part of the game is ‘the rules’.
the ride is in itself a kind of machine for generating unusual feelings in your body. you can play games to alter these feelings while they happen.
people will either enjoy it or not. they might cry. if they do they’ll likely be a young kid, and i would look to see whether their parent wanted me stop the ride. mostly they ignore me or indicate i should keep going. then i feel like i am prolonging the suffering of these kids.
for a couple of weeks then, i don’t press the stop ride button before the ride ends its actual run for anything other than someone asking me to let them off… but once i’ve kind of had enough of things i would maybe end the ride early if someone was upset… people were being too annoying. standing up… making fun of myself or other riders… etc. long enough for people to have had their fun but before its time.
i’m generally very permissive in play. when play is work that i don’t want to do, that’s what brings in this kind of rigid and pissed off attitude i began to have. i’m very much not that person, and yet i am.
weighing up how long to permit someone’s suffering for the pleasure of others, with the added factor of not wanting to talk to these people about why its upsetting to both the kid they’re torturing and myself. a kind of avoidance from a lifetime of being the neurodivergent kid putting up with things that make me desperately annoyed and upset. i don’t like this aspect of the work at all. and it reminds me of the stories of torturers who go to a psychiatrist and say that the torture is getting them down… they don’t know how they got there… but they can justify it… for the money… for the cause…
the nicest feeling is when i would have a person i would recognise myself in, usually of any age and tall enough to ride alone… on their own, going on the ship multiple times, maybe ten in a row, not saying anything or interacting with others but acknowledging me gratefully… like, yeah, it’s a giant stim machine, it’s awesome and they are doing exactly what i’d do if i was on my own in this place and didn’t have a lot of learned inhibition about people seeing me as weird. the second best is when it’s a couple of people doing this, and they’re not annoying.
there’s these truisms people express about others that are nothing short of eugenics and working in a job like this you can both see how people get there from adding up 3 interactions they have with similar people… ‘young adults are all annoying and disrespectful’… and you also learn the opposite when you have these interactions with polite young people and rude adults… essentially, like riding the bus, it makes you aware of the fact that the broad categorisation of people based on their activities is a deeply violent social act encouraged by our current political systems and media… like…
in a pirate reality i have interactions with the most trans people i’ve ever met outside of meetups, in a general public setting, and these are generally mundane and transactional. as staff, and as park visitor. and in various fashions of transness, to the point of my own assessment of people in any fashion feeling very bizarre… despite it being good fun to operate a ride that in a lot of senses has a very diverse audience… there is in this capitalist service mundanity a trained alienation from other forms of collectivisation i suppose. from collectivity between worker and audience. between trans people in a country that has a don’t ask don’t tell implementation of various things right now with the risk of job loss… it’s that that gets me to start wearing revolutionary badges on my bag again. to try to make friends despite my urge to ignore it all and just be there for the money. to talk to the union table that is set up in the staff room one day… and yet now i leave the job for better pay as an administrator at a university, a thing i can’t say i’m sad about…
in the communist future, i am not a pirate ship ride operator. maybe a designer though, more seats at the back, so people don’t need to wait if they want a more intense experience…
i myself experience my own expression of gender, as a non-binary person, reflected back to me through guests. most adults referring to me as male, young adults and kids as somewhere between male, non-binary and female depending on the person… I don’t really “try” either way, wear a uniform that’s pretty ambiguous, have my hair in a ponytail, am wearing sunglasses and a hat, am fat and have boobs the shape of which are discernible if I’m not in the big rain jacket.
kid 1: miss?
kid 2: I don’t know if they are a miss
kid 1: huh…
kid 2: mister…
kid 1: no they’re a lady…
kid 2: mister… can we ride again?
kid 1: can we ride again?
GlitchOut 