For my first job, I worked in the Cash Control department of a local amusement park. At the time, it was called Geauga Lake Park, locating in Aurora, Ohio directly across the lake from Sea World, Ohio. At some point after I left Ohio, it become a Six Flags and then was sold off again. I am not sure who owns it now…I worked there for seven summers.
We counted the cash. At night. We ran pick-ups with security to remove a bunch of the cash from the bigger stands mid-day, basically to give us something to do and to get a bulk of the money counted before park close. They were late nights. I started at sixteen years old and often got home from work at 2 am.
By the end, I was one of two assistant leads, which meant I also worked the morning shift to enter all the numbers and balance the daily sheets. The back to back shifts truly rotted, closing one night and opening the next at 8 am. They didn’t happen often and were usually during the week, not on weekends which ran much later into the morning.
The counting was divided into departments. We basically had five people on a weekend night. The five counters were (in descending level of difficulty): games, gift shops/vendors, two counting food stands and the fifth did nothing all night but run the massive amounts of coin from the four coin pitch games…
I don’t think I ever counted games, but I typically counted the giftshops since I was so accurate. Giftshops were difficult. They had to be done by an accurate counter, since many of the stands were on commission and were paid by the sales totals.
Yes, sometimes overages and shortages in the money could not be traced.
Very odd that.
This job is where I developed my tendency to do things exactly the same each time. We had to do so. Adding machine tape for everything. We needed a paper trail for balancing at the end of the night. Large bills were the only optional entry. Back then they were uncommon. Then – always – 20s, 10s, 5s, 1s – subtotal – rolled coin in descending value: quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies – and then loose change. Each station had its own coin machine. If nothing of a denomination was turned in, a zero got entered to mark its place.
I remember the biggest night I worked. It was a huge weekend. Lots of company picnics. I was one of the food stand counters. I counted over twenty grand that night. The deposit the next day was over 100 grand. It was huge for us. I remember looking at all the numbers and thinking, “Wow!” for the shear amount of work it was for us, but the cash stacked up before me wasn’t too spectacular.
People used to always ask me what it was like to count all that money.
Well, it wasn’t mine. It was just pieces of paper that I had to count long into the night.
I still remember my ten-key training. I use it on the keyboard. In fact, I despise using the numbers across the top of the keyboard. They are horribly inefficient. This is part of what makes me hesitate to get a laptop. I cringe every time I am on one and need to enter numbers.
My life without a number pad is slow and awkward.
This is my other secret math life.
I was never really a bean counter, but I was one of those people behind the glass…
gryphon's hole 