Critical Writing Assignment #4

I was in my job at Busch Gardens working the mid station of SkyRide catching gondolas.

The SkyRide is a cable car ride which means it never stops. A gondola is the carts in which

people go in, these weigh 500 lbs. empty and about 900 lbs. with people. My job at mid station is

to catch the incoming gondolas and send them to the next station by placing them in the thruster.

Mid station is outside of the guest area of the park so the only people at mid station is the three

workers at mid and any gest I the gondolas who are not allowed to get off at mid station, so they

are just passing by. It was Thursday the 27th of April around noon that a couple of people came

thru mid-station in all together in about one hour there were Spanish, Italian, Portuguese,

English, and what sounded like German speaking groups passing by. These groups although they

spoke a different native language had one thing in common, they insisted that they wanted to

continue to ride and did everything from hand signals to speaking in their tongue in hopes that I

would understand. At mid-station we must check the looks on the door for every gondola, and

people start to freak out and saying that they want to continue. This is interesting to me because I

cannot rap my head around the fact that some guest think they get to decide when they get on or

off a ride and how many times they can ride. Not just that but if they do not even speak English

they still feel the need to demand in a different language “to continue”. Even the groups that

speak English all completely ignore the multiple sings that say “this is not an exit. Only a

checkpoint” and continue to ask, “can we keep going?” or worse “We are going to continue!”

even though there are three workers on this station I am the only one interacting with the guest I

am talking about because the other two are on the other side of the station attending to the guest

going in the opposite direction, because SkyRide goes in two different directions one is to the

front of the park the other is to the back.

 I have worked in SkyRide long enough to know that no matter which of the three station

you are in at least once a day you will get a group asking or demanding to continue riding. I am

even willing to bet that in the same hour I got so many groups demanding to continue at mid the

other people at mid also had people saying they were going to continue. I think it is interesting

that people just ignore all the signs that say it is not an exit and continue to demand to “keep

going”. It is possible that they missed all of the signs but then they demand to keep going not

everybody asks if they can continue, No most people Tell you what to do. I find it interesting that

they are trying to tell us how to do our job.

I believe these groups of people had their front and back stages kind of mixing. I believe

this because ones less formal self is usually a back-stage way of being, things we do with friends

that are close to us but not really something we present to others, like being rude with your

friends because that is how you talk with one another. When people come to Busch Gardens their

goal is not social approval, they are thinking more along the lines of getting what they want. The

micro aspect is these different groups that tried to command us, the workers at SkyRide, to feel

like they hold some kind of control because they paid to get into the park. The macro connection

is that perhaps they do this because when they return to where they are from, Europe, Asia,

Brazil, or maybe even somewhere in the US they return to a routine life where they have less

control and their form of vacation is something that gives them more control.

From chapter 13 of the reader the first reading, India’s Reproductive assembly line by

Sharmila Rudrappa talks about women being surrogate mothers. Towards the end of the article it

says that “they believed that the reproduction industry afforded them greater control over their

emotional, financial, and sexual lives.” People are always trying to gain more control over their

lives and the women in India who chose to be surrogate mothers because it offers them more
control, just like people who attend Busch Gardens want to decide how to do things in their

vacation, because they want to feel in more control of the situation. Also on chapter 9 reading

number two, The Smile Factory by John Van Maanen talks about what is expected of employees

like me in situations like the one I described. In this reading Maanen talks about all the strict

rules and ways of acting people working in Disney have to follow and Busch Gardens is not

different. The customer is always first, and if they make you mad just keep smiling and be

helpful. In the situation I was in all I could do was tell them “you do not get off here, you keep

going to the next one.” Also, I had to use hand signals very often for the people that did not

understand English. My job has “highly codified and strict set of conduct standards” as Maanen

put it.

I believe that the theoretical lens that I am using to analyze the sociological relevance of

this setting is a conflict theorist framework. I say it is conflict theorist because I incorporate the

struggle for control, which is a form of power, as a reasoning for way gest act the way they did

towards me, towards us the workers in the amusement park. A conflict theorist believes that the

various institutions in society promote inequality and conflict among groups of people. The

system of the amusement parks creates inequality, this is because we the employees cannot be

anything but nice even if the gest are being rude otherwise we risk our job. My positionality as

an employee makes me more susceptible to getting irritated at situations were gest are

demanding of me to do something than someone who is not a worker at Busch Gardens. This is

because I work there I know the rules and conditions and subconsciously I expect the gest to

know them as well.