Today

Woke up. Drove to Stoke-on-Trent. Purchased stuff from OverclockersUK. Drove to Alton Towers. Had day of fun. Drove home via Pizza Express. End.

Now why could I have not put that in a tweet on Twitter?

Because, at OcUK I purchased a steelseries 5L gaming mousepad, which, btw, is AWESOME. It’s so much better then using the desk. My Logitech G5 just *glides* over it, effortlessly. I also picked up a Logitech VX Revolution mouse, but that’s not for me  – as I said on Twitter, I’ve ordered a laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad R61E), iPod nano (silver, 8GB), and the the mouse for one of mum’s friends who wanted me to do so (it’s for her daughter, who lives overseas). Anyway, as she doesn’t have a PC, and I suggested against buying from PC World’s overpriced stupid crap range of products, I’m doing the order for her.

But that’s not the reason I’m posting this. I’m posting this because of the ‘brawl’ that happened at Alton Towers today. Basically, it was about 6:45pm and I was queuing for the Spinball Whizzer. I usually always go on the single rider queues because it’s shorter. Most of the time. Anyway, I was queuing behind a guy and his wife/girlfriend, and this other family came up behind me. As far as I could see there was the dad and four kids, three of them under 12 I’d say, and the other looked about 16 or so.

So, as I’m standing in the queue, the two in front of me are talking with some other guy in the queue, loudly, about Alton Towers vs Thorpe Park, and if a season pass would be worth it. As they’re talking, the family behind me, well, mainly one of the small kids and the 16(ish) year old start to sortof push in in front of me (I hate Alton’s wide queue lines for that exact reason). As it’s the single rider queue, I was just going to wait until he got to the front of the queue and then push back in front of him. However, I got the chance to sortof get back in the front of him and the kid once we’d gone round the corner in the queue line. So, I stretched out both arms and leant against both sides of the queue. The little kid then decided to re-push-in and went under my arm, right next to my elbow, so I bent it back over, and knocked him, incredibly lightly on the forehead.

So, guess who decides to complain? The 16ish-year-old decides to then say, loudly, “oi, you elbowed by brother in the face”. lolwut. So, I turned around and said “well maybe if you stop trying to push in, he wouldn’t have been knocked in the face. And I hardly elbowed him, it was more a gentle knock”. Anyway, he didn’t like that so he said to me, and I quote, “I’ll smash your fucking face in if you’re not careful”. In the interest of 1) saving my face, and 2) getting him to shut the hell up, I turned round and ignored him. Besides, I’d hardly be worried about knocking his little brother’s forehead lightly if his big brother acts like that…

Eventually, the queue disappeared and the couple in front of me went on. Well, more importantly, they didn’t. See, the twat behind me was only the beginning. The two in front of me is where it gets good. Before I go on – Fasttrack (or is it Fastrack?) is the ticketing system at both Alton and Thorpe that allows you to “jump” the main queue and go on a second shorter queue, on the condition you pay for the Fasttrack ticket when you come into the park (it’s about £5).

Anyway, so, the couple in front of me had already used up their Fasttrack ticket earlier that day. However, he decided to try and use it again, so that, despite being in the single rider queue, he could go on with his wife/girlfriend. However, the ride operator said no, they’d have to go on separately. So, he tries it with another operator…who says the same thing. Anyway, to cut out the boring bits (and by now I had got into one of the Spinball cars and was watching all this), they eventually were told after INSISTING that they go on together that they must either get off or the staff would call security. By this time they were both sitting in the Spinball car, so the one operator bent down and undid the restraint. The woman got up, but the guy refused to and stayed in the car. He was told, again (and this time over the PA so the WHOLE QUEUE LINE could hear), to “get off the ride now or else I’ll [the ride operator] call security”. He still refused, and, on top of that, pulled the restraint down (yeah, clever, so now that security is coming you now don’t even have the chance to do a runner). So, the guy says again over the PA, “don’t undo the restraint, I’ve called security and they can come and undo it”

By now, there’s a whole bunch of people standing at the exit, watching. The people in the main queue are getting annoyed and starting to get annoyed, and one woman calls out “stop acting like a child” to the guy’s wife/gf. BAD IDEA. The wife/gf storms across the track, grabs onto this woman in the queue and starts trying to scratch her face, while the woman in the queue pushes her away, accidentally pulling her top down (look away little kiddies, nudity!). So, the Alton staff throw themselves in the middle and try and get the wife/gf away from this poor queue line woman. By now, security had arrived. By “security”, I mean two older looking guys who weren’t much at all, but enough to basically say “stfu you dumb bitch”.

So, the one security guard is all up in the woman’s business trying to tell her to leave, and she’s saying “stop spitting in my face”…anyway, after about another two minutes, two MORE security guys arrive (by now it’s turning into a HUGE issue, half the park had turned up to watch), and restrain her, since she was still trying to attack the woman in the queue. One of them goes and gets the husband/boyfriend out the Spinball car, and takes them over to the side (away from the queue), to talk to them. They’re now both acting like retards. On top of that, the guy then starts swearing at the queue woman’s husband/boyfriend and starts arguing with him.

Eventually, the “serious” security guards turn up (the ones with handcuffs, a full uniform, and one of them looks like the “I’ve got a beard and I WILL kill you if necessary” type), and they all get escorted off the ride and down the back path.

So the whole thing lasted about 20 minutes, and they stopped the ride running for about 20 minutes because they acted like small children not getting their own way.

What they could have done: Gone on the ride, separately, and be done with it.
What happened: Made a HUGE fuss over a tiny issue, wasted 6 security guards’ time, the ride operators’ time, extended the queuing time by about 20 minutes, got kicked out the park, and provided lulz for about 100 onlookers.

When I finally had a ride, and got off, the stupid guy behind me was waiting in the queue line to fling insults at me (again). Anyway, since it was now about 7:40pm we just left, drove back to Stafford, had a quick meal at Pizza Express, and came home.

So. That was my day.