In one of the other threads on here, Bobby and Brittany were mentioning both having spent time working at carnivals. Although I dearly love going to carnivals; I have never worked at one. However, I did have a similar thing one year, where I worked at the Eastern Washington State Fair and sold computer-generated photos of people. The hours were forever. We started early in the morning, and went until almost midnight each night. But, I had a lot of fun with my job, and it was one of the things in life that I wished I could have done for a longer period of time. This was back in the late 1980's, and the idea of being able to take a picture and print it out (black and white only) on a dot-matrix printer was just catching on. The man that I was working for set me up in a booth with a camera attached to a computer, and as people walked by, I would zero in on someone (which they could also see on the monitor that faced the aisle ) and take their picture. Then , I would print it out for them, and offer to take another one. The printed pictures were free; but if they wanted a frame, or to have it printed on a tee-shirt, then we charged for that. I took pictures of sweethearts snuggled up together, families with their children, mommies with babies, seniors with their dogs..... you name it, I took a picture of it. I had an old motorhome that I parked at the lot in the back where the other workers stayed, and that is where I slept at night. When I had a quick break for food, I grabbed a hot dog, or a piece of the BBQ chicken that they served at the fair. It was a week long job, and I was ready for a break after it was over; but I really enjoyed doing it, and it made me think that I would simply have loved to take the motorhome and gone from one fair to another selling the computer photos.
When I owned an ambulance company, we had a contract for an annual rodeo, which ran for one week. It was a PRCA rodeo, but they also had the 4-H agricultural fair stuff, the midway, the rides, and all of food stands that you'd see at a county fair. Besides the rodeo, there were other competitions as well. We were contracted to run a first aid station twenty-four hours a day and to have an ambulance there while the rodeo events were taking place. Although the rodeo shut down at night, there were all of the carnival people, the rodeo people, and the kids with their cows, pigs and stuff, so there would be a lot of people there during the night. We opted to keep an ambulance there overnight since the first year we had that contract, we kept having to dispatch units to the rodeo grounds anyhow. At night we used the first aid station as one of our base stations so we'd send that unit out when something came up nearer to the rodeo grounds than to our next nearest station. So we'd have three people at the first station. Two would go out in the ambulance, when needed, and one would man the first aid station. During the day, while the rodeo was going on, while we were contracted for only one ambulance, we actually had to have two on the grounds because when that ambulance was transporting someone, rodeo rules required that the rodeo come to a stop until another ambulance was in place, and people would get edgy having to wait. So the one that was stationed on the rodeo grounds didn't leave the rodeo grounds. They would prepare the patient for transport, and we'd send the other unit from the first aid station in for the actual transport. That saved having to open a lot of gates. The bull riders were usually the only ones to be injured enough to be hospitalized though. Pretty much every day of the rodeo, we transported someone from the bull riding event. Although it was a professional rodeo, some of these professionals were only sixteen or seventeen. Since I was one of the owners, I usually put myself in the first aid station, so that I'd be available to handle any coordination that needed to be done, while my partner handled the rest of our business. We had 9-11 contracts with seven cities and about a fourth of Hidalgo County, Texas. Most years, we'd end up assisting someone from at least one of the food stands, and they'd give us free food for the rest of the week, and there was all kinds of food that was available for free after the rodeo grounds closed for the day. I enjoyed the rodeos. It was almost a city there after the gates were closed, with people gathered in different places playing music, rehearsing things for the next day, or tending to their animals.