I am a statistics nut. The other day, I had to run through a thunderstorm and I thought to myself "Oh, no, I am more likely to be hit by lightning than win the lottery!" This is especially true because I don't play the lottery, but I do have to go to work even under bad weather conditions. The lottery is a topic for another day.
When I was a kid, the point values in a skeeball for the 5 holes were:
50, 40, 30, 20, 10
Now, they are:
50000, 40000, 30000, 20000, 10000
Apparently, someone at Skeeball, inc. thought it was a good idea to build fragile children's ego by raising all point values by 1000x. I'm sure it cost a few extra cents in paint for the extra 15 0's and a few more cents to have a point total board with the extra 000 on the screen, even if it is nonfunctional, and will always show 000.
I suppose this goes back to my high school math class where we would have one question quizzes and the teacher would grade it with either a 1 (for correct) or 0 (for incorrect.)
I support laziness instead of meaningless self-gratification with math!
However, there is something more sinister! When I was a kid at chuck-e-cheeses, you had to score at least 150 to get your first ticket, 180 to get the second ticket, etc. Now, you get your first ticket, even if you 0 on you first ball, and I usually walk away with 15-20 tickets each time.
Of course, if you are going to win more tickets for equal performance, the silly finger monsters and cardboard airplanes are also going to cost a lot more at the showcase. This is not a problem for the people that come in, roll 12 games of skeeball, 3 games of the hoop shot and fail at the bowling-ball-over-the-hump game who redeem all tickets at the end of the day. However, this ticket inflation surely did mess up the poor kid who was keeping tickets for investment purposes. You know, the kid who actually tried to save 800 tickets for the Tozai cd player with the gray mouse on the front, who came back a year later to find the price has increased to 2000 tickets.
I just want my red bouncy ball and be done with it.
There was another skee ball fad in the early 90s that I never understood. It makes sense to me that if you are going to aim for the premium value holes (50, 40, 30), you should roll strait down the center. Somebody came up with the bright idea to bounce the skee ball of the side of the skee ball alley (is it an alley, or a lane?) and somehow, this idea stuck. It probably stuck because the first guy who did it was so good at it, he always got the 50.
To get the skee ball where you want it to go, you need to things, the correct direction, plus enough force to get it as far as it needs to go, no more, no less. Throwing it strait down the middle was the easy part. If you miss the 50, at least you might get the 40. If you bounce it off the side, if you miss the 50, you might not get a 0.
