Skate World (i.e., "Lord of the Flies" on wheels)

Last week I had a stretch of 8 days in a row of skating. Yay! Still much work to be done on my crossover and booty blocking, sadly. Bruiser has been a big help, as has Ringer.

One of the days, we skated at Skate World in Springfield. It's a fine rink -- good floor, they serve Diet Coke at the snack bar. Unfortunately, the staff are all teenagers, and if the place has any rules, they sure don't seem to enforce them.

The day that we were there, a young woman (probably a teenager; she's too tall to be a kid) who is an excellent skater but kind of a jerk was making a game of skating a lap and deliberately falling right by the DJ booth. I could tell she's a regular, both because I've seen her there many times, and because the staff all seemed to know her. I guess that explains why she was able to LIE ON HER BACK, on the rink, TEXTING. She was mostly out of traffic, but not entirely (as I said, she's a very tall girl).

At that point, I was already sick of the total lack of rules at Skate World. I skated over to the DJ booth and asked the employee (who was *totally* looking right at the girl -- and I waited a few laps to make sure they weren't going to do something about her), "Are you seriously OK with her lying on the floor TEXTING?"

He muttered, "I can tell her to stop."

I said, in kind of a "mom" voice, "Does this place have ANY rules?"

His answer, "A few."

I gave him what I hope was a withering look, like, "How about enforcing them, then, idiot?" (I did *not* say that). They did make the girl get up, at least, and she didn't do anything else like that for the rest of that day.

Other stuff that went on there, that I completely disapprove of: a guy skating around carrying a toddler. And not just skating the kid off the rink, which would still be a bad idea, but skating around with the kid in his arms. That's really unsafe.

Oh, and then there are the kids who fall, are not injured at all, and still take several of my laps to get up -- because they are screwing around. All I can say about that is that if someone rolls over their fingers, it will be their own fault.

I'm not asking for a dictatorship. I don't need it to be like Oaks Park, where *I* have been told to slow down (I'm not that freaking fast). But even if you're pretty laissez-faire, it seems like a no-brainer to draw the line at LYING ON THE RINK FLOOR. Sheesh.