Lost….

This was almost the last picture I ever took of my son.  

The nightmare happened to us today.  We’re at SeaWorld’s “Aquatica” waterpark…  enjoying some time out of the heat… 

They have a water-climber-thingie there.  It’s a MONSTER.  Six or eight slides, four levels, two big drenching buckets, and a lot of places that big fat parents can’t get to without a pry-bar and a gallon of crisco…

Well today it happened.  My 5 year old, (who I am convinced is the result of my monther’s curse “Some day you’ll grow up and have kids who act JUST LIKE YOU DID.”) got lost in this thing.  Look at the picture above and tell me – how easy is it to lose a kid in this mess?

Once we realized he’d gone missing we started the search.  Alerting the lifeguards, etc.  (Note to SeaWorld staff – the correct response to “My child is missing” is *NOT* “Well we’ll let you know if we run across him.”  #justsaying)

I ran around the perimiter of this monster and this is what I learned:

* There were no fewer than 5 entrances and exits.

* There were MAYBE 3 lifeguards at ground level watching some 150 kids.  A handful at higher levels paying attention to nothing but the slides.

Then as my paranoid mind took these facts to their logical conclusion I realized a few other things.

*NONE* of the parks we’ve been to in the last week, including the self-proclaimed “Happiest Place on Earth” have any meaningful way of preventing a child from getting lost, plan of action for acting on a loss or alerting parent’s of said loss.  More importantly, none of them, NOT A ONE, has any process / proceedure for dealing with someone taking a child out of the park with malicious intent.

NOT. A. ONE.

Even Chuck-E-Cheese, that famous purveyor of bad pizza and loud annoying furry animals, has a process in place all-but guaranteeing that the people who bring the kids in are the ones who take them home.

So why then do these parks, with all of the MONEY and technology, not have the same?  Hell they even fingerprint the kids on the way in as a means of keeping people from sharing a single ticket…doesn’t it make sense that this could be used to make sure the people the kids are leaving with are their rightful parents?

I always thought a simple RFID bracelet on parents and kids that were paired together would do it.  If a kid tried to leave alone or with parents not his own, alarm.  If a kid without a bracelet tried to leave, alarm.  If anyone tried to leave without their bracelet, alarm.   Easy, right?  I could probably write the software in 30 lines of code or less, and I’m not a programmer.  Great Wolf Lodge resorts (www.greatwolflodge.com) even has a wrist-band that can tie a kid to the room # they’re staying in, so if  kid gets lost all they have to do is scan the wrist-band to figure out where they belong.

Answer me that Disney, Universal Studios, and ESPECIALLY SeaWorld.  Why is it that protecting your revenue is more important than protecting the safety of the people within your gates?

Needless to say the next time my youngest son get’s set loose in a water park of any kind, he’s either going to be in college or he’ll be wearing a Lindsey Lohan style ankle-bracelet.

If you’re interested, you might check out http://www.brickhousesecurity.com as they make a handy-dandy and WATERPROOF child locator with a “wander alert” should your tagged child leave your preset safety-zone, and with a monitor that if you need to find your kid will literally point you in the right direction.  (No compensation was paid for this review, but I’ll take a free one if they want to offer…)

Oh – and as an FYI – he had wandered out of the area, up about 10 flights of stairs to the top of a waterslide called something with the word “Terror” in it that he apparently was under the impression that his under 48 inch-ed-ness was going to be allowed to go down without an adult handy.

And as further proof that he is my son, he gave the security guard holy hell trying to get him down from the top of that slide…only agreeing to finally when the security guard promised that he could say good-night to the WHOLE PARK on his radio when they got to the bottom.

Which he did….(after his mom and I were finished hugging on him and scolding him that he should never ever do that again.)`

My son’s “Good-Night SeaWorld!” was heard by all tonight….thankfully.