![balu ball pit balu ball pit](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71xcqZlSdxL._AC_UL320_.jpg)
The manager of the franchise –– who also owned it –– reminded me a lot of Gustavo Fring from Breaking Bad. After closing every night, I got sent into the danger zone with a bottle of OdoBan and a fresh roll of Bounty paper towels, with the express purpose of identifying “dirty balls” and “giving them a once over.” Despite the task sucking mightily, my fellow high school co-workers and I had some good laughs. Cheap toys kids had won in the arcade, beloved blankets belonging to little girls and boys, lost forever in the sea of plastic, and moldy slices of pizza that had been there for weeks, just to name a few treasures.īecause it took so much effort to take out the balls, we did preventative maintenance. You wouldn’t believe the type of shit we found at the bottom of the pit. Cheese dish boy, part of my job was to “clean the pit.” At the end of every month, we’d pull all the balls out, put them on massive tarps, spray them with disinfectant, then pile them back in. Maybe with enough context, you’ll believe what happened to me.īack to ‘92. Second –– well, let me give you a bit more background, then it will all make a lot more sense. First, ball pits are fucking disgusting, if you didn’t know that already. I say good riddance for a couple of reasons. But I don’t see a resurgence of ball pits taking place after the Coronavirus clears up. They’re calling 2020 “The Year the Ball Pit Died.” Actually, that’s just what I’m calling it. At the time, ball pits were still very much a thing. I’d recently landed the esteemed job of “dish boy” at the local Chuck E. 1992, some nondescript suburban city in the mid-Atlantic region of the east coast.