Have you worked, or considered working in the industry?

Wow, you're just setting me up with the easy pitch on that one.

Unfortunately, I feel that even my best swing won't do that softball justice. :)

--

On a different note, it's nice to know the inquisitive/surprised look has an allure to it. Maybe I need a little more pout?

Wow. You got compared to Alvey. That's FUNNY!

(though maybe the confusion there comes from your new Facebook avatar? ;) )

+1

Tekwardo said:
Wow. You got compared to Alvey. That's FUNNY!

I suppose I haven't reached rock bottom yet. I'm not an insult at this point.

I'll worry when Paula heads over there and compares me to him. :)

LOL. Or Paul Ruben.

Heh.

Ok, so I take the Bronze Medal in the Enthusiast Douchebag Olympics.

I'll try harder in 2014.

You'll always be a gold medalist to me, my friend.

This is kind of right up my alley.

A while back, I used to work for a traveling carnival. I didn't work the rides or anything like that. I was the guy behind the counter selling fair goers those yummy chili dogs, corn dogs, and polish sausage. You might not think anything of that, until you know that our single stand was bringing in $20,000.00 a night on average, with the carnival dealing with crowds of up to 300,000 people on a single evening.

If you are wondering where this might be. It was part of Grand Rapids, Michigan's fourth of July celebration in downtown Grand Rapids. They stopped having the carnival due to issues with the Gerald Ford Museum, but, I worked there 3 years in a row, and made $500.00 for working only around 36 hours in 3 days. each time the fair came around.

There is a lot going into setting up a carnival. It's amazing how fast they can put those rides together, the carnival Zipper is the easiest to set up. The most complicated is the Hymalaya as it comes in hundreds of parts, and the heaviest work is the tilt-a-whirl. Everything is planned on paper before the fair arrives, and stands are often moved from night to night based on where crowds are gathering.

If a stand, or game isn't working out in one place, They will move it to another spot. And, that ride that appears to be broken down, may be just in limbo waiting for traffic to pick up, as the rides run full steam when the carnival sees its highest volume of customers.

Carnival workers put in long hours. I usually worked 12 hours a day, which went by very fast, because we had a line all day and night. But, some of the ride operators work from open to close, and then spend an hour or two just shutting things down.

I also spent one day working from 10 a.m until 1 in the morning. I remember my cart boss telling us that we sold 2,000 hot dogs on the fourth of July at our stand, and that didn't include everything else we sold there. I think our sales that night were around $23,000.00.

I'm guessing that carnival was easily raking in over a million dollars every night that they were there.

Oh, and I also aplied to work at Disneyland, and I was hired, but I couldn't find a way to get to California, So I had to call and cancell. I also applied at Cedar Point, but those were both years ago.

Your post makes me wonder if some of the idiotic notions of the Meijer corporation must have rubbed off on Cedar Fair. As we were told we could not hold another job with a supermarket, or retail chain because it was against company policy. Yet they talked about Walmart like they were the kings of the underworld, and are pretty much copying everything that they are doing, and then turning around and slamming them at every store meeting.

And, I find your post very funny, because in my emails with a certain park chain, they say that all of their prices and policies are the same as any other chain, so where are the secrets? I can't imagine there is something really surprising that we don't already know about amusement parks. (Or retail giants)

The only reason they spout crap like that is to keep their employees guessing. They keep saying an informed employee is a good employee, but it's even better when they don't know too much. One of the reasons why it is so hard for older workers to get jobs, because we have already been there and done that.

Just a comment.

LostKause said:

Because park employees are not allowed to publicly allowed to disclose company secrets, and writing about your amusement park job on a Blog would make it too easy to slip and say something that they are not supposed to say. It's kind of like allowing a seasonal employee represent the company, which is something a full-timer should do, in order to control the information shared.

Each year that I worked at CP, we were told by management that they weren't even comfortable with allowing us to use the internet at all. We would get fired if we were found telling secrets, like what the rumor for the next new ride was going to be, or about a recent accident on a ride at the park.

On the other hand, they did provide employees with internet access...

Never worked directly for the industry but my engineering firm occasionally does work for amusement parks. Best of both worlds.

As we were told we could not hold another job with a supermarket, or retail chain because it was against company policy.

That's Standard procedure at any business. It's a conflict of interests to be working for the competition. And that's good policy.

What LK is referring to is that as long as you are employed by CP (or just about any park for that matter) you signed a contract that states that you can not tell the world about what goes on at the park. While a lot of what goes on is seemingly minor in importance , in today's litigious society it can come back to haunt you in more ways than one, not only for the employer, but also the employee.

This isn't quite what I was looking for in terms on a memoir, but it's close:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dh66u/iama_exdisneyland_chara..._tell_you/

Talking about non-disclosure agreements: a friend of mine interviewed for a firm in the Pittsburgh area, and one of their employee requirements is that you sign an agreement stating that when you leave the firm-- by your choice or theirs-- you will not seek employment with any other firm in the same discipline within a radius of 50 miles of their office.

So they could lay you off sometime in the future, and your two choices would be to move or enjoy a looooong commute.

Or change careers.

Usually those types of non-compete clauses are limited to a number of years after the working relationship ends; they don't stretch into infinity (or can't be enforced as such).

In any case, it would be a bummer, and I'd definitely be mindful of playing a bunch of Minesweeper on the clock!

Those non-competes are often not enforceable, and in some states, not even legal.

It also depends on the "specificity" of the information you have. For example, someone stocking shelves doesn't really have any specific competitive advantage gleaned from that store, but skills that anyone in a similar job at any of the company's competitors might have learned. You are allowed to take those sorts of skills with you to a new job.

On the other hand, if you're the guy who (while paid by one company) designed a super new way of stocking shelves that cuts shelf-stocking time, you might be prevented from taking that specific process to your new company---provided the process wasn't "publicly disclosed". But, you could still work for the new company as long as you didn't develop "the same" shelf-stocking scheme. This is more "non-disclosure" rather than "non-compete", though.

There are some situations in which the old company will argue that no reasonable person would be able to "leave behind" the things they developed for that company when working for a new competitor, and so to work for a competitor is necessarily to disclose. But, (as Jeff points out) those cases are *very* hard to make.

Even in the case of HP's ex-CEO taking a "competitive decision-making job" at Oracle---which is about as clear a case of this as you could hope to have---I suspect nothing will come of HP's suit to block the move.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704358904575477870066918884.html

Edited to add: those non-disclosure terms *do* have force, though. I was a consultant on an IP case that recently settled. I'm barred for consulting "in the same area" for a specific list of competitors of the two litigants for two years after my final destruction of any confidential documents.

Going back to reading RGB's note:

Such geographic competitive restrictions *could* sometimes carry water in sales jobs. Your job *is* the personal relationships you build with customers. You can't leave a sales job and leave those relationships behind. If you work for a *local* competitor, the local competitor benefits. If you work for a non-local competitor, though, they don't.

I've got a couple of family members in health sales jobs (one pharma, one devices); I'll have to check with them to see whether these clauses might stick.

In a civil engineering office like I'm referring to, there are no new products or devices created. Most designs are site-specific, so it's not like you could take one project and plop it onto another site and have it work.

What Brian mentioned could be a valid concern-- developing a client base that might rather work with the individual than the firm. But this would only hold true for the people who interact with the clients, project managers on up. Very few draftsmen or design engineers have much client contact.

I know of so many people who worked for various firms within the same region, if not the same city, and it never seemed to be an issue. In fact, I saw one job listing where one of the requirements was "an established reputation in xxx County."