Ask Lemmy

I've a few fun stories.

I spent some years around the turn of the century running a video arcade in a shopping mall. (Kids, ask your parents what both of those were.) Kids regularly got themselves kicked out for violence, whether toward the machines (sometimes hard enough to chip paintwork) or against each other (always fun when a round of Street Fighter results in a round of Regular Fighter.) I once banned a kid who had stolen a roll of prize tickets behind my back while I was reloading a machine's ticket supply, and very intelligently tried to come back the next day to buy prizes with the still-intact unused roll. I once got a family banned from the entire mall because they decided to leave a scared toddler - maybe five years old, no ability to play the games or money to spend on them, and no discernible ability to communicate in English - alone in the arcade - a dark, crowded, and noisy place with its own open door leading directly to the parking lot - while they went off to do their shopping in the rest of the mall. The kid was turned over to mall security who got the cops involved.

More recently I worked for some years in a 3D-print-to-order factory which I'll call "Shapeways," for that was its name. Custom tabletop RPG dice sets were popular items; considerably more expensive than getting a standard set from the local hobby shop, but available in all sorts of bespoke designs in cool materials. One customer was apparently so dissatisfied with their dice order that they not only sent a bunch of Chaotic Evil emails and phone calls about it, but included direct threats to go down to the factory personally to teach us some sort of lesson. This resulted in their account being shut down, authorities getting involved, and the factory hiring an armed security guard for a few months over a set of dice which could simply have been reprinted or refunded. (Shapeways has since shut down, but as far as I know it was not over unsatisfactorily-printed dice.)