Now that Chuck E Cheese's is in the meme economy, I'll tell you all some of my very true stories from when I worked at my local CEC (yeah, we actually called it that) as a teen.

First of all, people think the pizza at CEC is shit. Well let me tell you, they made the dough and breadsticks fresh every day. This was in the early 2000s, so I don't know if it ever changed. You might not have liked the taste, but I guarantee it was clean food.

I fixed the games there, so if you want to be technical, it was my first job in tech. I still think about the analog and digital wonderment happening inside of arcade games regularly because of this job.

This one time I reached into the loudest, brightest game on the arcade floor and touched a fuse. I'm still not sure it didn't kill me and that I'm living in some kind of 6th Sense reality now. It would answer a lot of questions actually.

At CEC, the economy runs on tickets and tokens. Have enough of either of those things and you can change a person's life forever.

The tickets used to come in these fat stacks tied with string at both ends.

I've never felt like more of a baller than me at 16 carrying 1000 ticket stacks like bundles of laundry across the arcade floor to put into a game.

One time we had a security breach.

A machine's ticket door was left open and the tickets were gone. It was up to us to discover the source of the breach and determine if the key system had been compromised.

I and another coworker who I'll call "Darney" (because I'll never bring them up again.) Decided that HUMINT was the best way to track down the culprit.

We put out the word, 1000 ticket reward to the kid that squealed on their friend.

Never did find the ticket thief though. I think Darney didn't close the ticket door completely before he turned the key back to the lock position. Stupid Darney.

I always warn people, if you have kids, never let them climb around in those play tubes. They never get cleaned and I'm sure that there are super-diseases just chillin' in there.

This one time, a little girl climbed up into the play tubes via the tiered climbing system (as seen below). When she got to the top, she got scared and peed herself. The pee trickled down each tier like a depressing rube goldberg machine.

Guess who got to clean it up.

The ball pits on the other hand were cleaned every night. And after each shift, there was *always* a thick black ring of filth around the edge.

Just because their cleaned every night though doesn't mean there aren't weird, disgusting things lurking in there.

Diapers were a regular find. I'm sure they were constantly covered in pee and drool. I heard an urban CEC legend about needles being found in them too, but who knows.

I had this coworker who was pretty relaxed most of the time but would say outrageous things to the kids b/c I think he just liked getting a rise out of them. I'll call him "Ronty".

Our job as arcade techs involved carrying pocket fulls of coins around to test the games with. You get that "Omar Comin'!" effect when we would walk by. Kids would hit you up for free tokens all the time. It was basically a street drug.

A kid ran up to Ronty once and asked if he could have some tokens. Ronty told him no and that he didn't have any. The kid protested and told Ronty he could hear them jingling in his pocket. Ronty told him "those aren't tokens, they're bullets."

BTW, all of this is happening on the backdrop of one of the best managers I ever had in my life.

My 6"8' Addonis of a man whose real name was "Zeus".

Zeus was a protector. This one time, I saw a kid sticking his arm up into the spot on the skee-ball game where the balls come out of.

The inside of that component has this very gnarly metal release switch inside of it. Even worse than the one pictured here.

I was worried this little kid was going to get his hand mangled in the machine, so I went to help him before something awful happened. His dad saw me next to his kid and instead of also trying to help his child, he got furious at me.

He must have been embarrassed that he let his 5 year old stick his arm into a dangerous machine and wasn't paying any attention because he wanted to fight me. That was, he wanted to fight until Zeus showed up and told him it was time for him to leave.

Thank you, Zeus. I'll never forget you.

Every night, we'd have to clean the games down. It was the hardest part of my job, because the managers would come by with this huge 10,000 candlelight power flashlight (the kind you find on fishing boats for night fishing) and walk down all the games.

You could honestly overlook a fingerprint here and there because they're really hard to see on glass. The flashlights were ridiculously overpowered for this purpose.

That didn't stop two of the dumbest coworkers I had in those days from playing a game of "stare into the light until your eyes stop working".

My friend whose name I do remember, but I'll call "Carter" for this story was a goofy kid who got hired to be the rat.

One time I heard raucous laughter coming from inside the small closet where you change into the rat costume.

Carter was staring into the mirror making faces at himself and laughing half to death. Maybe he was high. Then again, maybe the spirit of the rat had driven him to madness.

In retrospect, the rat made us all crazy to some degree. It was a veritable Wonderland of weirdness with some of the most unforgettable people.
Maybe in the end, Chuck E. Cheeses is really just a metaphor for life...

...and the rat, a lurking analog for the choices we make.
Where is Zeus now?
Did Carter lose his mind forever?
Am I really alive, or am I in a permanent coma being kept alive by the very same machine that incapacitated me?
We may never know.