Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This question is probably relevant to anyone who has ever been a tour guide, ride operator, booth operator, show performer or any role where you are subjected to the same routine several times per day (or even per hour!). How does it sit with you psychologically?
After hearing the same franchise song, or the same recorded lines repeated for the Nth time, do you just tune it out? Do you go to bed with jingles, phrases, scenes or dialogue replaying uncontrollably in your head?
This is a thought that has often occurred to me whenever visiting a touristy attraction but never got around to asking. I hope that your experience is not torturous!
There was a recent episode of The Goldbergs, where Adam is working in a diner. He's a waiter, but he's also a singer and dancer in this themed diner. Apparently he and the crew sing the same little ditty and do a little dance daily, if not more.
The episode shows him getting burned out doing the same thing over and over and over again, and he kind of loses his zest for life.
There have been times that I've served as a guide to direct people attending large events to and from the local transit service at that location. Of course I would get the same questions over and over. "How do you get to XYZ?" "How do you buy a ticket?" "When does the next train depart?" That sort of thing. Sure, it got repetitive. But I would have to consciously remind myself that even though I heard the same answers coming out of my mouth again and again, each person to whom I spoke was only hearing it once.
Anyone who has ever traveled by air has heard the pre-flight safety briefing. "Emergency exits are located in the forward, center, and aft sections of the cabin. In the unlikely event of a water landing, a floatation device may be found under your seat. Blah, blah, blah." Southwest's flight attendants used to spice things up by ad-libbing the spiel, which undoubtedly made it easier for them to take instead of hearing themselves say the same things over and over. And the variety and humor did seem to encourage the passengers to pay attention. Unfortunately, they've gotten a lot more "corporate" in the past few years, so nowadays, they're just as boring as anyone else's attendants doing the same spiel.
P.S. I'm very well aware of how important the safety briefing is. I'm just saying that droning on and on in the exact same way, every single time, is a recipe for having people tune them out.
I would consider that a pretty mild case compared to, say, somebody who runs a fair booth who has to listen to the Spongebob Squarepants theme song on loop for seven hours a day. Or an actor who is part of an amusement park routine who has to talk to characters with silly accents and cheesy lines, and crack a smile each and every time. All day. Like, do those people enjoy their work (no hate on them if they do)? Maybe it's always a short term arrangement?
Cashiering in a movie theatre box office gets very repetitive. That part does get tuned out or go to muscle memory, and the focus shifts more to examining clothing, attitudes, hidden signals in plain sight, and wondering what to eat on break. Being a projectionist and changing reels again becomes muscle memory and a little dance.
Practicing a musical instrument or being in a band or orchestra means lots of repetition as well.
The people I felt really sorry for though, were the ones loading the rides at the 64 World's Fair listening to "Its a Small World" for days on end.
Cashiering in a movie theatre box office gets very repetitive. That part does get tuned out or go to muscle memory, and the focus shifts more to examining clothing, attitudes, hidden signals in plain sight, and wondering what to eat on break. Being a projectionist and changing reels again becomes muscle memory and a little dance.
Practicing a musical instrument or being in a band or orchestra means lots of repetition as well.
The people I felt really sorry for though, were the ones loading the rides at the 64 World's Fair listening to "Its a Small World" for days on end.
OMG YES!
That Disney nightmare was the 1st example I thought of.
Did a family thing a few years back so I rode it as a 40+ guy, it still gives me anxiety.
This question is probably relevant to anyone who has ever been a tour guide, ride operator, booth operator, show performer or any role where you are subjected to the same routine several times per day (or even per hour!). How does it sit with you psychologically?
After hearing the same franchise song, or the same recorded lines repeated for the Nth time, do you just tune it out? Do you go to bed with jingles, phrases, scenes or dialogue replaying uncontrollably in your head?
This is a thought that has often occurred to me whenever visiting a touristy attraction but never got around to asking. I hope that your experience is not torturous!
I've been a tour guide. If one is giving the same routine several times per day, then they aren't a good tour guide. You can have some of the basics be the same ('What do alligators eat?', and you answer), but overall, you need to read your audience, go with the flow, have some wit, and it's always helpful to learn a little bit from many languages to entertain them.
We didn't have jingles or franchise songs, or recorded lines.
One of my corporate jobs was tech product training. At the time some regions would schedule vendor product training as "round robin" sessions all throughout the day whereby I would be saying the same information 6 to 8 times a day in some hotel / event center. Yes, the content of the training gets boring but by virtue of having different audience and encouraging questions it broke up the monotony somewhat.
Volunteered at a event type fair for a weekend in my mid 20s and it was for a carnival like contest (ring the bell with sledgehammer) . The only redeeming thing about that was people watching. The sales pitch was rote and the trick of sliding the fulcrum block to enable little kids to "ring" it versus the other way to disable ringing was fun for a day or so.
Another very repetitive job was sorter / loader at a package delivery company for four hour shifts. This was during college years and I looked at it as getting paid to work out. Since the coworkers were mostly college age males it had a fun camaraderie.
As long as you have the type of mind that enables you to do multiple things at once it is fun. We'd create games amongst ourselves and sing "oldies" songs for fun. We had a running gag with large parcels going down a chute to a conveyor belt. After supervisor was confirmed as being 'out of sight'. We'd start humming / whistling Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture and then at appropriate time a coworker (ba-da, dada, dada, da da daaaa) would toss the large heavy parcel (castings / bowling balls) down the chute, as it would make a great "cannon" like reverb sound as it bounced off the metal sheeting side walls to keep packages on the conveyors.
The amusement park like ride set up would be the worse to me. If I was in Disney stuck anywhere near something like "It's A Small World" I would wear ear plugs. I'm surprised they haven't had a shooting from an employee suffering trauma from hearing it over, and over, and over....
As traveler I take walking tours where I know the guide has likely gone over the same highlights countless times so I try to (when appropriate) ask questions to spice things up. Occasionally, a guide will tell you their particular area of interest and it can make a touristy type event very enjoyable since they have a love for the topic. On other hand one of the places I used to work for coordinated events that included "tours" and we'd hire people to double up with drivers to give a talk track of highlights and during event I would "float" amongst the vehicles to help monitor how good they were to see if they were worth bringing back the next year. Often times some would just go off script and make stuff up or had terrible reading comprehension skills and it was pathetic. Fortunately, a few of those instances were 'saved' by a good driver who knew some of the content based upon the area being shown.
If you have good short term memory and you pay attention, no matter how boring the 'duties', you should be able to come up with fun parallel things to make it bearable. I would think tourist type environments would lend themselves to side diversions on a repetitive task / duty much easier than say the manufacturing environment where people (think Chinese factories with netting outside upper floor windows to prevent workers from jumping) try to commit suicide.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
) would toss the large heavy parcel (castings / bowling balls) down the chute, as it would make a great "cannon" like reverb sound as it bounced off the metal sheeting side walls to keep packages on the conveyors.
