From: ung@felix.filenet.com (Bill Ung)
Newsgroups: rec.games.pinball
Subject: Re: Trouble reporting (was: Re: LW3 and Super Mario Brothers)
Date: 18 Aug 92 00:14:46 GMT
Reply-To: ung@fritz.filenet.com (Bill Ung)
Distribution: usa
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA

In article <5539@transfer.stratus.com> overturf@bigbootay.sw.stratus.com (Dallas Overturf) writes:
|||In article <LFS.92Aug9165437@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu> lfs@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu (Lyman F Sheats Jr.) DID NOT write:
|
||Tell me about it, I deposited $1.00 into a HS2 only to find the upper
||flipper broken (worked about 20% of the time, and NOT at full strength).
||With the first game in progress and on the first or second ball, I
||informed the folks working there who promptly refused to refund my
||money.  Hey, the games are still there, I haven't used them yet!  They
||wouldn't even transfer my credits to another game.  Now THAT'S what I
||call bogus.  I know a lot of places have a "No Refunds" policy, but is
||that fair?  Shouldn't there be a law that if a game is broken, they're
||required to refund your money?  If you see a movie, and the film breaks,
||you get your money back.  If you buy a VCR and it doesn't work, you get
||your money back.  Why not for pins/vids?  To top it all off, they didn't
||even bother to put an out-of-order sign on it.
|
|Where was this Lyman???

Be careful when quoting, Lyman did NOT write that, I did.

And the place was KONA LANES in Costa Mesa, CA ... on Harbor Blvd.

|Any place should refund your money.  Course those that put up
|a sign that claim Play at your own risk also fail to take into
|consideration the old rule "do unto others..."

I've always thought those signs were bogus.  They know 15 year old kids
come in and play and they're easy enough to blow off if they lost a dollar
or two.  I've no qualm if some kid comes up and says "I lost $2 in that
game over there" without any sort of proof, but I had two credits left and
one game active (on ball 2) on the pin, and it was plain as day that the
flipper didn't work right.  What more proof do you need?  If they did that
to me on a bowling lane, I'd be lobbing all my balls from then on.

|And I most certainly have no problem in telling them to cough
|up or chance losing the machine!!!  picking up the front a couple
|feet and letting it drop while they watch I once found to be a very
|effective means of communication with a place that messed with me.
|Strangely I was not even thrown out; though we weren't on good
|speaking terms for a few days.  In this case they knew they 
|were wrong and what really irked me was they knew I was right!
|So there never should have been such an incident.

I don't suppose picking up a pinball game by a few feet and dropping
it can be construed as vandalism, could it?  If I were an operator,
and someone did that to me, I'd probably call the cops or something.
That CAN'T be legal, can it?

|Guess every now and then you gotta remind some folks you're not
|taking and crap from them.

Well, here's an idea.  In earlier days of mischief, my friends and I
used to go visit PHOTON ... a Lazer-Tag type of place who was making
a killing on all the kids that went there.  $3.50 for a six-minute
game ... not bad.  Well, we decided to fuck with their system a little
and went upstairs to the cheap-lazer-tag room where you have a stationary
gun and you fire at the people below you.  They are not affected by
your game, but you gain points for each person you hit.  These games
were $1.00 each ... again, for a six minute game.  What did we do to
these games?

1)  We folded pieces of paper and slipped them into the coin slot.
    As expected, the games would no longer accept the $1.00 tokens
    and various people would all be banging on the slots at one time.
    Invariably a guy would come upstairs with keys and tweezers and
    clean out the slots.  Non-permanent damage, but very effective
    and very annoying.  An option here might be to write them a nasty
    little note on the paper telling them WHY you did that.  I'm
    strongly considering this one.

2)  The other option is to fuck up the change machine.  The ones that
    pull in a dollar and spit out quarters or tokens.  A wet napkin
    can disable a change machine VERY effectively and I don't think
    tweezers will do much good unless you have a LOT of patience.  I
    never saw them fix the change machine after we broke it, they
    just slapped an out-of-order sign on it and added a change-guy
    upstairs.  I haven't done this one in years, but it's looking
    pretty damn good to me.

Feel free to try either of these techniques wherever operators are
being assholes.  An eye for an eye, right?

Bill Ung
  ung@filenet.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.pinball