What's with the ducks?

I didn't take any pictures of the ducks. But seriously...ducks?

We had a birthday party for one of Cass's friends last weekend that was scheduled for 10:30 am at a Dave and Buster's. If you're unfamiliar, Dave and Buster's is essentially a more adult version of Chuck E. Cheese's---a sports bar with games of both an arcade and carnival style.

As a parent, I get the 10:30 am Saturday start time: plans change or fall through, and as the date approaches, you just need a place.

Anyway, you get to eat, then the birthday boy's mom hands out the cards, and the kids go crazy in the arcade. Cards, you may be saying? These arcade games don't take quarters, they take card swipes or taps. A part of the birthday party package, each kid gets a set number of game plays, and the rest is fun-time.

One of the games (that I couldn't et anyone to play so I could watch) was a Ghostbusters version, that had face cutouts of the back for photo ops:

That I, apparently annoyingly, had pictures taken with both kids:

Maybe it wasn't annoying. I don't know.

At one point I noticed one of the Claw-game apparatuses appeared to have a the number 10 showing on its panel. I was about fifteen feet away, but I could make out the 10 just the same. Nobody was there as I approached it. Corrie and Camille were at a cabinet console and Cass was somewhere on the premises, so I had a moment to explore it.

It was full of rubber duckies in a wide assortment of colors and patterns. I started to operate the joystick and the claw leapt to life. There was a duck that appeared to be sitting atop a veritable ducky mountain, and I tried to drop the claw right on it. Success! The claw automatically brought the duck to the drop-off, and gave me my prize.

How serendipitous, I thought. Free rubber ducky. As I turned to leave, the panel readout on the game still read 10. I looked around. No one even noticed the middle-aged white dude at the ducky claw machine. I tried the joystick again. Again I located---and GOT---another colorful duck. Again afterwards, the panel read 10.

This turned into a bonanza. On and off for 40 minutes the malfunctioning machine yielded dozens of ducks, to me, to kids walking by noticing me getting ducks and get interested only to be told by me that its all free and here you go grab a duck, to other parents. By the end, the pockets on my shorts were full of rubber duckies. I think by the end I had a total of 14 ducks. That number may seem small or it may seem big, but if you were to look at the pile of ducks all at once you'd say: That's an unreasonable amount of ducks.

Corrie said, "Do we need more bath toys?" 

It was never about the actual prize, but it helped that it was the easiest prize to attain. The sense of accomplishment gained by beating the claw game 14 times out of 25 (or more (sheesh)) for FREE was prize enough.

But...no duck pictures...