Just wanna throw out a personal thing that really, really bothers me this year.
So, maybe oversharing, but my dad recently died of a lung disease after smoking since he was twelve years old. It’s been two years, I’m only twenty now, and I haven’t had many encounters with death, especially of those so close to me, so I’m only just now starting to handle it well. Because of all of that, several things cause me to sort of go 100 mph in my brain and seize up for lack of a better term. It’s not a panic attack, but it’s something, and even though I’m aware of it when it happens, I can’t stop it.
When I go to a theme park, I expect a) for people to have some semblance of respect towards others, and b) for staff to take care of those that don’t. I just got to experience an unmoving Yeti line with two men right in front of me who shamelessly took out an entire pack of cigarettes, without any sneakiness, and just lit up. In a queue. I counted, and seven different team members, including three managers, were gathered in the same area not even forty feet away, laughing and talking. No ops saw these guys, even though they’d stepped behind the rope boundary and were clearly in an area (under the Rockit) that they weren’t supposed to be in and were clearly visible to the group.
I waited for a good five minutes, holding my nose and holding back tears while praying for someone to please come say something. A manager came up behind them, but said nothing. I don’t know what she was doing, but it didn’t have anything to do with these guests in front of her face.
I’ve been under the impression that Universal has several designated smoking areas which still applied even during Horror Nights, but I guess it isn’t regulated. I left the queue in tears because of this heavy cigarette smell and secondhand smoke I couldn’t get away from. Just imagine if I were replaced with an older visitor, or a guest with lung issues? Not only is it very uncomfortable for me, but it would be extremely dangerous for them. I wish people really cared about rules; I’ve had example after example of ops being inexperienced as well as testimonials from actual scareactors about it, but this sucks.
TL;DR - Abby is a sensitive baby and can’t stand people smoking cigarettes in queues and not getting any kind of reprimand about it.