So I have mentioned in previous posts that when I worked at the Longstrike Deck we were not the most well-behaved employees and certainly caused our fair share of shenanigans (see You’re Out, Day 15, Throwing Food.) Today I thought I would share another fun story of one of the ways we caused mischief on the deck.

Let me preface the story by saying we were allowed to have free fountain sodas while at work so don’t worry, we were not doing anything wrong in terms of taking stuff we weren’t allowed to have. That being said, let me tell you about soda roulette.

The Longstrike Deck had two soda fountains and they both contained the same four sodas plus lemonade, iced tea, and fruit punch. Many times we would mix two flavors to create a new flavor. Sierra Mist with Fruit Punch or lemonade with iced tea were a few favorites.

There were also times when we took mixing drinks a bit too far. A favorite practice became mixing all the flavors in one cup and seeing how much you could drink before it became too gross to handle. Why we thought this was a good idea I will never know.

Being the mature young adults that we were, we of course took it to yet another level. This is how soda roulette was born.

Everyone knows the age old advice about not leaving an open drink unattended at a party or any type of large gathering. This advice also became a warning in the deck stand. If you left your drink sitting around or left the stand for any reason, you had to be a daredevil to risk taking a drink when you got back to your cup.

Did I mention we also had a hot chocolate machine in the stand? Have you ever tried Mountain Dew mixed with Pepsi and hot chocolate? Trust me, you don’t want to.

Confessional: What is one prank that you and your coworkers have ever played on each other? What was the end result?

I’ll never truly understand why we thought this was a good idea or what made us decide to start doing it in the first place. It became a habit that if you went out to go to the bathroom or even just to refill the condiments or napkins, when you got back to the stand it was in your best interest to toss out what was in your cup and get a new drink. We became very good at sneaking a cup back to the exact location it came from after messing with the drink. It was also very hard to tell if anything was wrong with your drink if you had a lid on it. Yes, we would take a lid off and add different sodas before replacing the lid. This went on and on all summer – for multiple summers.

There were some occasions when someone would come back to the stand and take a drink without thinking. Those were the best moments. The look of pure disgust on his or her face was the end goal. No one would ever rat out the perpetrator either; we all teamed up against the one person who dared to leave his or her drink unattended.

Now, we do deserve some credit. We only ever pulled this prank on each other and never on any of the adults in the stand. They all knew we did it though and never said a word. I’ll never truly understand how we got away with everything we did, but in the case of soda roulette it was simply a fun prank we all played on each other. It would be impossible to do in most of the stands at the ballpark now, as most of the stadium has switched to bottled sodas. We have a soda fountain in the UIC, but seeing as there are only two of us who work there it would not really be a fun game.

Despite some of the disgusting concoctions that were ingested during those few summers, soda roulette still remains one of my favorite memories from working at the Longstrike Deck.